7 - The Alliterative Siege of Jerusalem: The Poetics of Destruction

Summary

Unlike many of the romances medievalists work on, the alliterative Siege of Jerusalem has been the object of a number of thought-provoking articles in recent years, after a long period of the kind of neglect still common to most of the other alliterative romances. An entire book has been devoted to a careful summary of scholarship on the poem and after seventy years there is a new edition. And yet, the critics who have worked on it, while acknowledging its poet's literary skills, have not been led to see in it hitherto unnoticed virtues, as usually happens to those of us drawn to critically ignored texts. Instead they make a remarkable effort to distance themselves from it, even while acknowledging the poem's literary effectiveness. David Lawton, for example, who co-edited the new EETS edition, calls it ‘a poem that even its editors cannot love’. Mary Hamel refers to ‘its cruelty and bigotry’; and, most dramatically, Ralph Hanna, Lawton's co-editor, refers to it as the ‘chocolate-covered tarantula of the alliterative movement’.

Why then the considered and complex analyses of the poem which follow these harsh judgments? The most obvious motivation for taking it seriously, although I do not think in any of the recent criticism it is the most compelling, is the popularity of the work itself in the later Middle Ages. It is found in nine manuscripts or manuscript fragments, an extraordinary number for any medieval romance, and especially for alliterative romances, which are almost all extant in unique manuscripts. Only Piers Plowman, of all alliterative works, was more widely copied, according to the remaining evidence. Not just the number but also the variety of the manuscripts in which it is found suggest its wide appeal. Nonetheless, for modern critics a more significant reason for study than its medieval circulation seems to be an interest in alliterative poetry in general, as witnessed by a number of fairly recent works, culminating possibly most powerfully for the Siege in Christine Chism's Alliterative Revivals. For her, what makes the Siege, like other alliterative romances, worth examining is ‘their embodied and spectacular performance of history’ (p. 2). This historicizing impulse, strongly influenced by post-modern criticism, is also I think central to the work of Hanna, Lawton and Elisa Narin van Court.