4 - National, world and women’s history: writers and readers in post-Conquest England

Summary

An important function of literary histories is to organize discussions of texts into diachronic categories and groupings so the reader has a working map of a given literary period. This chapter, however, is the place for a less tidy kind of literary exploration as we consider the contexts of production and reception of material in English in post-Conquest England. One of our aims is to consider both how much and how little we can know about the audiences and the writers of early Middle English texts from the later twelfth and the thirteenth centuries. The chapter gives particular consideration to Laзamon’s Brut, a historical narrative about the foundations of society on the island of Britain and the eventual formation of England; to the handbook for anchoresses known as Ancrene Wisse, together with its associated ‘Katherine group’ of saints’ lives of Juliana, Katherine and Margaret; and to some related texts and textual traditions. A particular concern is the textual communities of religious women, their literary history, and their relation to texts imaging the history of the Britain they inhabited.

Elizabeth Salter has drawn attention to the limitations of attending only to works written in English as a means of understanding the literary scene of medieval England:

We can be tempted to dramatise the importance of what English literature exists, and to see its ‘history’ in an evolutionary way, as developing through lean periods of foreign domination to a national triumph after 1350. Theories of hidden continuity can be a useful way of disguising what appear to be empty spaces … [but] it may well be that the silences which seem to surround and isolate many English writings of the thirteenth and fourteenth century are, to the attentive ear, filled with the sounds of an active world which is only partly English, partly literary.