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- Author: Mimi Ensley x
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Difficult pasts combines book history, reception history and theories of cultural memory to explore how Reformation-era audiences used medieval literary texts to construct their own national and religious identities. It argues that the medieval romance book became a flexible site of memory for readers after the Protestant Reformation, allowing them to both connect with and distance themselves from the recent ‘difficult past’. Central characters in this study range from canonical authors like Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser to less studied figures, such as printer William Copland, Elizabethan scribe Edward Banister and seventeenth-century poet and romance enthusiast, John Lane. In uniting a wide range of romance readers’ perspectives, Difficult pasts complicates clear ruptures between manuscript and print, Catholic and Protestant, or medieval and Renaissance. It concludes that the romance book offers a new way to understand the simultaneous change and continuity that defines post-Reformation England. Overall, Difficult pasts offers an interdisciplinary framework for better understanding the role of physical books and imaginative forms in grappling with the complexities of representing and engaging with the past.
This chapter examines the material ways in which romances were preserved and categorised – rather than erased – by early modern readers. The chapter begins with a discussion of Protestant polemicists who crafted lists of romance texts to warn readers against them. Paradoxically, in doing so such polemicists created their own romance canons. Their booklists effectively define a genre. This chapter argues that these polemical catalogues expand the early modern conception of the medieval romance genre by including new forms, such as the continental prose romances gaining popularity in the sixteenth century, along with lighter, comical ‘jests’. The chapter also shows that the catalogues defined in early modern romance lists reflect material, paratextual decisions made by William Copland, the primary printer of medieval English romance in the late sixteenth century. Despite the consistency of the books included in such catalogues, however, the case studies that conclude this chapter – the romance collection detailed in Robert Langham’s letter describing the 1575 festivities at Kenilworth and an antiquarian Sammelband now housed in the Bodleian Library – demonstrate that early modern romance catalogues were used to characterise and serve very different types of readers.
This introductory chapter situates this study within existing scholarship on the post-Reformation reception of later medieval literature. It defines the medieval romance genre and explores the various threads of the book’s methodology: its interest in periodisation, memory studies and materiality. It also introduces the book’s framing metaphors – the catalogue, the collage, the monument, and the museum – as possible alternatives to the notion of the palimpsest. The palimpsest is a useful metaphor for understanding the relationships between present and past, as it emphasises materiality and complicates notions of linear historical progress and simple chronological development. However, it is easy to forget that the palimpsest is a metaphor fundamentally based on erasure. By focusing on the genre of romance, Difficult pasts offers an alternative to a literary history centred on erasure. The new metaphors explored in this chapter embrace the temporal complexity of the past, but they also highlight early modern efforts to preserve and engage with, rather than destroy, medieval predecessors.
This chapter centres the metaphor of the ‘museum’ to explore one of the most popular Middle English romances to persist across the Reformation divide: Guy of Warwick. It compares the presentation of Guy’s artefacts in John Lydgate’s Guy of Warwick with Samuel Rowlands’s 1609 Famous History of Guy, Earl of Warwick. Both Lydgate’s and Rowlands’s Guy narratives present textual representations of artefacts associated with Guy’s romance. Objects like Guy’s sword, the axe of the giant Colbrond and the rib of the Dun Cow that Guy was supposed to have killed in Coventry become central to the longevity of Guy’s romance and to some authors’ conceptions of the material pre-conquest past. While Lydgate’s narrative positions these objects as relics, signalling the triumphs of Christianity over time, Rowlands’s text ‘musealises’ the artefacts, making them portals to and preservers of the distant, tenth-century past. Guy’s objects, in Rowlands’s text, become tourist sites and museum pieces. In both Lydgate’s poem and Rowlands’s, though, the artefacts feed off of the narratives that describe them; books become virtual museums or virtual reliquaries. The chapter ends with a comparison between Guy’s artefacts and those associated with the legends of King Arthur, demonstrating the different perspectives on the role of the romance past in the world of the present.
This chapter centres on Edward Banister, an Elizabethan scribe and recusant Catholic who used printed books as the exemplars for his early modern manuscripts of Middle English romance. Banister’s manuscripts, which include copies of Sir Degore, Sir Eglamour, Sir Isumbras, The Jest of Sir Gawain and Robert the Devil, have received little critical attention, and since the identification of the scribe in 1978, questions about how Banister’s biography and Catholic identity relate to his romance manuscripts have yet to be asked. This chapter, thus, interrogates the connections between the scribe’s recusant identity and his interest in the romance genre and manuscript medium. The metaphor of the ‘collage’ allows us to more fully comprehend the interplay of time and technology, creation and destruction in Banister’s history and manuscripts. We see technological collage in the ways Banister combines the aesthetics of print and manuscript, and we see cultural collage when we consider Banister’s position as a practising Catholic in the midst of a changing religious world.
This chapter takes on the metaphor of the ‘monument’ and turns from anonymous romance texts to those composed by named authors, in particular by Geoffrey Chaucer. As a metaphor, the monument highlights curated longevity as resistance to erasure. Monuments are crafted in the present to ensure the long-term memory of a particular version of the past. Thus, when he invokes Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale in Book IV of his Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser defines Chaucer’s work as a ‘monument’, albeit one defaced by time. The idea of the monument, then, is bound up with the idea of the ruin. Thus, Spenser presents Chaucer as a monumental ruin, one upon which he can build for future audiences. Importantly, he does not seek to erase Chaucer, but he highlights Chaucer’s incompleteness. This chapter compares Spenser’s treatment of the Squire’s Tale with a less well-known seventeenth-century Squire’s Tale composed by poet John Lane, who, like Spenser, uses the romance genre to build upon the ‘ruin’ of the past. Exploring both of these authors through the framework of the ‘monument’ reveals their varied approaches to the place of the ‘father of English poetry’ in literary history. Both authors use Chaucer’s romance as a monumental foundation upon which they might define themselves, Spenser as a kindred spirit, a poet, and Lane as an antiquarian scholar interested in restoring what time has defaced.
I conclude with a summary of what has been learned in this book by focusing on a final case study of the 1517 copy of Robert the Devil housed in the British Library. I then return to the idea of the palimpsest, assessing what has been gained through this attempt to find narratives that do not rely on erasure. I follow Sarah Dillon in finding value in the term ‘palimpsestuous’ as a means of moving the palimpsest metaphor beyond the idea of destruction. Overall, then, Difficult pasts suggests ‘palimpsestuous’ codicological metaphors for describing the place of the medieval within the post-Reformation world. It urges us to consider what remained, rather than what was lost, after the events of the Protestant Reformation in England. And it argues that books – and in particular romance books – continue to provide a special material site at which to explore notions of historiographic presence, distance, continuity and change over time.