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

If one should consult the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary while seeking a definition of ‘canon’ in the literary sense, one would have to scroll almost to the bottom of the page for ‘canon, n. 1’ to find it. There, hidden beneath a series of compounds ranging from ‘canon-lawyer’ to ‘canon-wise’, is a draft addition to the main entry dating to July 2002:

1. Literary Criticism. A body of literary works traditionally regarded as the most important, significant, and worthy of study; those works of esp. Western literature considered to be established as being of the highest quality and most enduring value; the classics (now frequently in the canon). Also (usually with qualifying word): such a body of literature in a particular language, or from a particular culture, period, genre, etc.¹

This definition-in-progress encompasses not only the valorisation at the heart of canonicity, but its inertia. The fact that canonical works are so often thought of as ‘traditionally’ great means that both they and the canon itself are insulated by the general assumption of their greatness – something that can be taken as a given, taken for granted (not unlike the definition above, which may be why it has not been explicitly folded into the main OED entry at any point in the twenty years since it was first drafted). Words like ‘established’ and ‘enduring’ gesture to the time that has passed, during which these canonical works have maintained a certain status that has been handed down from one generation of readers to another. They also bespeak a certain complacency, the presumption that, in the time to come, the canonical status of these works is expected to continue.

The complacency of canonicity has increasingly come under scrutiny as scholars from a variety of fields have raised awareness of the factors that have contributed to the canonisation of particular works. As shown by the work of scholars of gender and sexuality, race, and postcolonial theory (among others), the circumstances surrounding a work’s inclusion in or exclusion from the literary canon – who is assessing a particular work, how the assessment takes place, and to what end it is undertaken – play an important role in determining that canon’s shape. Since the ‘canon wars’ of the 1980s and 1990s, there have been frequent calls for a more diverse and inclusive literary canon, the establishment of new or alternative literary canons, or even the total abolition of canonicity.² At the same time, what has also become apparent is that one of the key criteria for canonicity – an author’s or text’s ability to withstand the test of time – is precisely what makes canons so resistant to reform.

The aim of this special issue of Textual Practice is to make it easier to see the canon for what it is and always has been: an inherently limited and limiting way of assigning literary worth that has shaped much of English literary history. As several of the contributors to this special issue point out, canonisation is a process of selection, of ruling in and ruling out, of choosing how attention ought to be distributed. But it is by no means a process of natural selection. We are fooling ourselves if we believe that it is only some inherent quality of a particular work that has rendered it worthy (or unworthy) of canonisation. And there may be no clearer example of this than the rich variety of texts to be found in medieval and early modern literary culture, many of which resist contemporary concepts of literary worth, and even literariness.

As the editors of a recent collection of essays on medieval literary form have noted, when it comes to discussions of premodern English literature, ‘the category of the literary’ on which we often depend (but on whose definition we are often not in agreement) is ‘necessarily anachronistic’.³ Some of the features that we would presume to be basic characteristics of an important English literary text – the identity of its author, its survival in a complete and finished form, its high rate of circulation at time of publication, its adherence to familiar notions of literary style – simply do not apply to the great majority of medieval texts and are at issue with respect to many works that survive from the early modern period. Indeed, the very survival of medieval manuscripts and early printed texts is sporadic, and what does survive almost certainly represents a small portion of the texts produced and circulating in medieval and early modern England. Many of these texts are only extant in fragmentary form, or as snippets copied into the margins or flyleaves surrounding other works. Many are not attributed to any identifiable author, which, while it may not be a total bar to inclusion in the canon (witness Beowulf), can preclude certain forms of enthusiasm or engagement. Some are written in French or Latin rather than English. And even those texts that we are comfortable referring to as examples of medieval and early modern ‘literature’ were not produced in a textual vacuum dedicated to belles lettres, but were constantly in dialogue with a vast body of textual material that is itself now rarely described as literary, including recipes, medical texts, legal records, and practical treatises.⁴ Due to our ever-increasing awareness of this fact, our sense of the medieval and early modern literary sphere has evolved to such an extent that, in the words of Daniel T. Kline, literary scholars concentrating on that period ‘are as likely to read a legal document, court record, household letter or historical account as they are to read a Canterbury Tale.’⁵

This is not to say that medieval and early modern English writers did not reflect on or aspire to literary greatness. On the contrary: by the late fourteenth century, English writers were regularly reappropriating the concepts of auctoritas emerging from biblical exegesis and classical commentary as models for assigning value to particular texts and authors.⁶ In place of canonical texts and authors, later medieval writers spoke of ‘fathers’ and founders who were believed to represent the highest standards of literary excellence and historical importance.⁷ Over the following centuries, writers would debate the question of who might be numbered among England’s great poets (or even ‘laureates’), with the medieval triumvirate of Geoffrey Chaucer, John Gower, and John Lydgate eventually giving way to figures like Edmund Spenser, William Shakespeare, and John Milton. But it was not until the eighteenth century that the canon with which we are most familiar today would begin to come into being, shaped by literary tastes and aesthetic theories that determined which authors and texts should have pride of place in accounts of England’s literary history.⁸

It is in large part because of these developments that the question of what might be categorised and read as literature is never far from the minds of the authors whose works are considered in this special issue on medieval and early modern canons. While a comprehensive account of medieval and early modern English literariness lies beyond the scope of the present issue, the essays gathered here put forward approaches to reading the textual landscapes of medieval and early modern England in order to present a fuller, more complex picture of what was written – and read – in the early stages of English literary history. As will immediately become apparent, this picture is not always consistent with what we are often in the habit of considering the most significant or artful examples of early English literature. Our goal is precisely to scrutinise and unsettle those habits. In so doing, we will be in a better position to think critically about the place of medieval and early modern texts in the English literary canon as it is conceived today, and as it has been constructed over the past three centuries. As the essay by J. D. Sargan and the essay co-authored by Helen Young, Shyama Rajendran, and Sabina Rahman make particularly clear, those premodern texts that have been considered worthy of inclusion in this canon are often considered as such because they have been believed to contribute to the image that Anglophone culture has often wished to paint of itself – that is, as a raciolinguistically superior culture shaped by centuries of standardisation. And canons beget canons: each period has its own selection of prized texts, those deemed most worthy of scholarly and student attention. As a number of studies on the relationship between pedagogy and the canon have shown, that attention, once given, reinforces the canonical structures under its lens: ‘it is through the teaching and study – one might even say the habitual teaching and study – of certain works that they become institutionalized as canonical literature’.⁹ That word ‘institutionalized’ hints at what has increasingly become an object of criticism: the very conventionality of the canon, its status as the supposed literary ‘norm’. As Salah D. Hassan notes of the word ‘canonical’, it ‘can be translated positively as great, major, and foundational, or negatively as unoriginal, overtaught, and traditional.’¹⁰ Such remarks point to the problem this issue aims to address: the way in which the English literary canon functions as both a product and source of sustained complacency.

The goal of this special issue is to identify and disrupt this complacency 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. While they may differ in their views regarding the inherent value of canonicity as a concept, the authors whose work is presented here respond to these theoretical, historiographical, and methodological developments across both medieval and early modern studies that continue to draw our attention to voices and texts lying outside of the traditional literary canon. The flourishing of material cultural studies, incorporating the history of the book and new ways of approaching the study of manuscripts and early printed books, has compelled medievalists and early modernists to reappraise how prevalent certain texts and genres were in a given cultural moment, and how inclined medieval and early modern readers were to place different texts and textual genres side by side – in manuscript miscellanies, household books, commonplace books and anthologies – in order to generate new reading spaces and experiences, as well as alternative meanings. New histories of the medieval and early modern book have sought to recover more complete and authentic reading experiences, returning texts to their premodern contexts and evolving new ways of understanding what are considered to be key works from the medieval and early modern period in relation to traditionally less-canonical works.¹¹ These developments suggest that both modern constructions of the premodern literary canon and modern understandings of what might have been considered ‘canonical’ in the medieval and early modern periods must necessarily be open to question, particularly in relation to evidence about how various social and cultural prejudices routinely exclude materials from our own ‘literary’ reading. Our hope as the editors of this special issue is that the essays presented here will stimulate debate (not least around the dangers of equating ‘lesser-known’ or – ironically enough – ‘popular’ with ‘less important’ or ‘less weighty’) and pose serious challenges to persistent assumptions regarding what and how medieval and early modern readers actually read, and what and how we, as scholars of these periods, ought to be reading.

The contributions to this special issue appear in roughly chronological order, running from an essay on early Middle English literature to an exploration of how ‘Anglo-Saxon’ came to be treated as the standard point of origin for English literature and culture. The first essay, by J. D. Sargan, considers an under-exploited source of further material from the often-overlooked period of early Middle English literature: the margins and flyleaves of medieval books. As Sargan points out, discussions of early Middle English literature are often imbued with a general sense of ‘loss’; the overwhelming emphasis on texts dated to after the mid-fourteenth century has painted a picture of the immediately preceding period as characterised by a paucity of both literacy and literary texts, apart from a few outstanding exceptions. Sargan demonstrates ‘how the marginal “archive” may be used to identify legible, teachable aspects of a much more widely circulating network of canonical early Middle English verse’, one that better reflects the dynamic culture of the period. Sargan demonstrates that looking at the edges of the material text can re-center our attention on texts that would otherwise disappear from literary history.

Following on from Sargan’s codicological approach, the second essay in this special issue, by Daniel Sawyer, examines the issue of what he terms ‘manuscript canonicity’ – that is, the interest that certain manuscripts generate on the basis of their ‘size, beauty, and provenance’ rather than the canonical texts they might contain. One result of this is that certain manuscripts receive disproportionate amounts of scholarly attention in relation to their ‘codicological peers’. While it may not be an altogether contemporary phenomenon, this asymmetry is reinforced by teaching and research that fails to encourage critical thinking about the way that attention is distributed among those extant manuscripts, as well as among those that have been lost. By turning our attention to those manuscripts that no longer survive, Sawyer argues, we might be able to ‘think around canonicity’ instead of continuing to replicate it. Sawyer’s assertions get at the heart of the problem with canonicity: its tendency to frame the atypical as typical, which in turn encourages us to devote a disproportionate amount of attention to a body of material that is ‘well-studied but unrepresentative’.

Like lost manuscripts, the anonymity of the majority of surviving Middle English texts has played a key role in determining which of those texts have been included in or excluded from the medieval canon. Myra Seaman makes a case for anonymity’s value as ‘a largely untapped resource for challenging the very notion of an author-centred canon’. By compiling data regarding the focus of top-tier publications on medieval literature, Seaman shows that both scholarship and institutional demands have contributed to the canon’s continuing influence on approaches to medieval literature. In response, she puts forward suggestions for how closer attention to the anonymity of many medieval texts ‘can move Middle English studies beyond the canon-or-genre identification that still drives its central questions and conclusions – and can offer a unique model for the ongoing reconsideration of the canon outside of medieval literary studies.’ Seaman’s essay exemplifies how the very aspects of premodern literature that seem to be in tension with contemporary notions of literary value can serve as a tool for redefining and reassigning literary value.

Carrie Griffin’s essay considers the fragmented materiality of a marginalised genre of medieval and early modern English literature: outlaw tales. The fact that manuscripts of outlaw tales, ballads, and plays tend to be so few and fragmentary continues to be a source of anxiety for scholars working on these texts, and has long stood in the way of their inclusion in the medieval literary canon. But rather than avoid or tiptoe around the problem, Griffin argues, scholars should explore ways of making the most of these precious surviving fragments. She takes as her test case Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.2.64, a fragment of the play now known as ‘Robin Hood and the Sheriff’. Closely attending both to its textual contents and its likely material history, Griffin demonstrates how much such incomplete survivors from the medieval and early modern periods can still tell us about the transmission, reception, and even performance of premodern outlaw narratives.

In her contribution to the special issue, Danielle Clarke revisits a particularly contentious matter: the question of how to push back against the persistent marginalisation of early modern women writers from the early modern canon. As she notes, Diane Purkiss published a 2019 review in the Times Literary Supplement that drew attention to the fact that early modern women writers remain at the margins of both the classroom and contemporary scholarship (though the review was also seen by some to attribute blame for this situation to feminist scholars who have failed to push back harder against the patriarchal strictures of the canon).¹² Clarke argues that women’s writing has the capacity to transform our sense of the ‘literary’ in the early modern period, and lays out several possible approaches that might enable such a transformation.

Natalya Din-Kariuki examines another marginalised set of early modern writings: travel writing. As she notes, travel writing is often presented as subordinate or marginal to the early modern canon, relegated in anthologies to sections with titles like ‘The Wider World’. This is partly a side effect of scholarship’s tendency to give precedence to early modern drama or verse rather than prose, but the situation is further complicated by the fraught question of how travel writing relates to concepts of ‘literariness’. Din-Kariuki takes aim at the problem by examining one of travel writing’s characteristic features: its tediousness. Far from a ‘failure of style’, this tediousness is, she argues, a deliberate stylistic choice made by writers such as Thomas Coryate, the author of Coryats Crudities (1611). Din-Kariuki’s essay reminds us of how often post-eighteenth-century notions of the literary can get in the way of engagement with the literary styles of earlier periods.

The final essay in this special issue by Helen Young, Shyama Rajendran, and Sabina Rahman, examines a ‘canon-making’ work: Thomas Warton’s The History of English Poetry, from the close of the Eleventh to the commencement of the Eighteenth Century (1775-78). Warton’s express aim in writing this work was to trace ‘the progress of our national poetry, from rude and obscure beginnings, to its perfection in a polished age’ (though he never made it past the Elizabethan period). As this declaration suggests, The History embodies a threefold agenda of race formation, canon formation, and the writing of linguistic history shaped by ‘an ideology of standardisation’ outlined by this essay’s authors. Young, Rajendran, and Rahman argue that, ultimately, in The History and its various nineteenth-century re-editions, ‘“Anglo-Saxon” is made the standard origin of English race, language, and literature’.

All of the essays that follow draw attention to aspects of medieval and early modern literary culture that may help to disrupt the complacency surrounding literary canonicity. As they make clear, the anonymity, sporadic, or even fragmentary survival, and even the blank spaces surrounding premodern texts can provide new data regarding the textual landscape of the medieval early modern periods, data that can help us to revise our sense of what makes a text worthy of inclusion in the literary canon, and even what ‘literary’ might mean in the first place.

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).