Introduction: confronting medieval and early modern canons

ABSTRACT

In this introduction, the editors lay out the rationale behind this special issue. The goal of this issue is to identify and disrupt the complacency surrounding the medieval and early modern canon with a view to achieving two things. Firstly, we hope to uncover new approaches to the study of premodern literature that might result in a more accurate and inclusive account of what texts were of greatest significance to readers and writers in medieval and early modern England, even if those texts have typically been excluded from discussions of the medieval and early modern literary canons over the past three centuries. Secondly, we hope to draw attention to some of the problematic roles that medieval and early modern English texts have played as foundation stones of the English literary canon, and how they might equally serve to disrupt some of the assumptions on which that canon has traditionally been founded.

KEYWORDS:

• Canon
• literary
• English
• medieval
• early modern

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 OED, s. v. canon (n. 1). The earliest attested use in English of canon in this literary sense dates to 1929, while the earliest attested use of canon to refer more broadly to, say, significant works of art or music is datable to nearly fifty years later. However, as Jan Gorak has noted, the eighteenth-century German scholar David Ruhnken appears to have been the first to use the word ‘canon’ to refer to works that had traditionally been assigned great value: ‘after the publication of Ruhnken’s book, it became common, if sometimes controversial, to extend the application of canon to any list of valuable inherited works’; The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary dea (London: Athlone, 1991), pp. 50-1. This development is also discussed in the introduction to a recent cluster of essays on gender and canonicity in Studies in the Age of Chaucer; see Laura Saetveit Miles and Diane Watt, ‘Introduction’, Studies in the Age of Chaucer, 42 (2020), pp. 285–93 (pp. 286-7).

2 On gender and sexuality and the literary canon, see for example Lillian S. Robinson, ‘Treason our Text: Feminist Challenges to the Literary Canon’, Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 2.1 (1983), pp. 83-98; Marshall Grossman (eds), Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre, and the Canon (Lexington, KY: The University Press of Kentucky, 1998 [pbk 2009]); and R. L. Goldberg, ‘Toward Creating a Trans Literary Canon’, The Paris Review, October 23, 2018, online at <https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/10/23/toward-creating-a-trans-literary-canon/> [Date accessed: 6 August 2019]. On race and the literary canon, see for example Mary Jo Bana and Irma Maini (eds), Multiethnic Literature and Canon Debates (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 2006). On the literary canon and postcolonial theory, see for example Salah Dean Assaf Hassan, ‘Canons after “Postcolonial Studies”’, Pedagogy, 1.2 (2001), pp. 297–304; and John Thieme, Postcolonial Con-Texts: Writing Back to the Canon (London: Bloomsbury, 2002). On the question of whether to abandon the canon altogether, see for example Joshua Landy, ‘Should We Abandon the Canon?’, Philosophy Talk, 12 August 2019, online at https://www.philosophytalk.org/blog/should-we-abandon-canon [Date accessed: 20 October 2021]; Katy Waldman, ‘The Canon is Sexist, Racist, Colonialist, and Totally Gross. Yes, You Have to Read it Anyway’, Slate 24 May 2016, online at https://slate.com/human-interest/2016/05/yale-students-want-to-remake-the-english-major-requirements-but-there-s-no-escaping-white-male-poets-in-the-canon.html [Date accessed: 20 October 2021]; and Viet Thanh Nguyen, ‘Canon Fodder’, Washington Post 3 May 2018, online at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/posteverything/wp/2018/05/03/feature/books-by-immigrants-foreigners-and-minorities-dont-diminish-the-classic-curriculum/ [Date accessed: 20 October 2021]. Perhaps chief among those who have sought to shore up the idea of canonicity is Harold Bloom; see in particular The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace, 1994).

3 Robert J. Meyer-Lee and Catherine Sanok, ‘Introduction’, in Robert J. Meyer-Lee and Catherine Sanok (eds), The Medieval Literary: Beyond Form (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2018), pp. 1–12 (pp. 4-5).

4 Recent work on practical texts in medieval and early modern culture includes Lisa H. Cooper, Artisans and Narrative Craft in Late Medieval England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011); Carrie Griffin, Instructional Writing in English, 1350-1650: Materiality and Meaning (London: Routledge, 2019); and Elaine Leong, Recipes and Everyday Knowledge: Medicine, Science and the Household in Early Modern England (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 2018). See also Daniel Wakelin on ‘pragmatic literacy’ and the relation of practical books to value; ‘Urinals and Hunting Traps: Curating Fifteenth-Century Pragmatic Books’, New Medieval Literatures, 20 (2020), pp. 216-54. As Irma Taavitsainen has noted, medical writing in the early modern period often transgressed the borderline ‘between literary and non-literary writing’; ‘Authority and Instruction in Two Sixteenth-Century Medical Dialogues,’ in Matti Peikola, Janne Skaffari, and Sanna-Kaisa Tanskanen (eds), Instructional Writing in English: Studies in Honour of Risto Hiltunen (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2009), pp. 105–24 (108).

5 Daniel T. Kline, The Medieval British Literature Handbook (London: Continuum, 2009), p. 12.

6 For examples of the earlier medieval accessus ad auctores that shaped the literary discourse of auctoritas in later medieval England, see Alastair Minnis, A. B. Scott, and David Wallace (eds), Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, c. 1100-c. 1375: The Commentary Tradition, rev. edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).

7 See in particular Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism; Seth Lerer, Chaucer and His Readers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993); Alastair Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, 2nd edn (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); and Robert Meyer-Lee, Poets and Power from Chaucer to Wyatt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).

8 On the making of the English literary canon, see for example Jonathan Brody Kramnick, ‘The Making of the English Canon’, PMLA, 112.5 (1997), pp. 1087-1101, as well as his later book Making the English Canon: Print-Capitalism and the Cultural Past, 1700–1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

9 Robinson, ‘Treason Our Text’, 84. On the problem of ‘hypercanonization’ as a side effect of attempts to forge a more inclusive pedagogical canon, see Hassan, ‘Canons after “Postcolonial Studies”’. R. L. Goldberg has recently put forward suggestions for what might be the basis of a trans literary ‘corpus’, hesitating to refer to it as a ‘canon’: ‘I’m apprehensive about the limitations inherent in canonization, mainly canon’s inadequate literary representation of difference as tokenism, and the prohibitive inaccessibility for those who can’t afford education at the highest levels’ (‘Toward Creating a Trans Literary Canon’).

10 Hassan, ‘Canons after “Postcolonial Studies”’, 298.

11 See for instance the essays in Margaret Connolly and Raluca Radulescu (eds), Insular Books: Vernacular Miscellanies in Late Medieval Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), as well as those in Kathryn Kerby-Fulton, John J. Thompson and Sarah Baechle (eds), New Directions in Medieval Manuscript Studies and Reading Practices: Essays in Honor of Derek Pearsall (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2014).

12 Diane Purkiss, ‘Rooms of All Our Own’, Times Literary Supplement 6046 (Feb. 2019). Purkiss’s remarks were partly the prompt for a special journal issue on the place of early modern women writers within the canon; see Criticism, 63.1-2 (2021).