II - Middle English literary writings, 1150–1400

Summary

Any attempt to give a concise account of the history of early Middle English literature, and of the material aspects of its production and transmission, faces both quantitative and qualitative difficulties. The relative paucity of surviving materials from the earlier part of the period is striking when compared with that from the later fourteenth century during Richard II’s reign; and the extraordinary efflorescence of what has come to be termed ‘Ricardian poetry’ (to which could be added ‘Ricardian prose’) constitutes a sudden richness against which the achievement of much earlier literature looks fragmented and relatively undistinguished. To these disproportions must be added an organizational one: a significant number of works for which distinctive ‘literary’ claims have been made, most famously the Ancrene wisse, have equal reason to figure among ‘non-literary’ materials and, categorized as religious or devotional items, are discussed elsewhere in this volume.

The cultural situation of English in the post-Conquest period was an extremely marginalized one that stands in contrast to the increasingly dominant status of Norman French. Throughout this period the evidence of book ownership from surviving wills and inventories indicates that cultivated readers who wanted ‘literary’ texts were likely to own these works in languages other than Middle English: that is, in French or Latin. The low status of the native tongue is a recurrent topos in writings in Middle English between the late twelfth and fourteenth centuries.