Introduction

Summary

Medieval texts cannot be adequately understood without reference to the institutions that generated, copied or preserved them; the place and moment of composition is often, of course, far from that of the text’s last (surviving) transfer to manuscript. Institutional discourses inform the peculiarities of literary texts; the accumulative study of such texts furthers understanding of how such institutions function. The larger imaginative construct subtending all this is the Church – specifically that Church whose infrastructures were drastically revised in the mid-sixteenth century. Much of the writing considered here – classroom exercises, penitential manuals, legal transcripts, fragments of translation – may not be considered ‘literature’ at all: but the acknowledged canonical authors of Middle English writing – notably Langland, Chaucer and the Pearl-poet – can hardly be understood as medieval English texts without reference to this under-studied, under-edited corpus, considered here under six interdependent aspects, or activities: monastic productions, friars and literature, classroom and confession, literature and law, vox populi (and the anti-institutional discourses of 1381), and Englishing the Bible.

The institutions in question here were exceptionally powerful: as powerful, perhaps, as any seen before the rise of modern multinational business corporations. One index of their power is a near-monopoly of textual production and conservation: monasteries, earlier chapters have noted, dominated the writing of history and the preservation of Old English textuality; more than half of all surviving medieval texts in Britain are monastic productions. (The term domination – from the Latin dominus, ‘master’ – is used advisedly here: the first Middle English text written by a nun has yet to be securely identified.)