5 - Middle English Popular Romance and National Identity

Summary

Popular romance and medieval national identity

‘Who are the English; where do they come from; what constitutes the English nation?’ Such were the questions regarding Englishness that Thorlac Turville-Petre posed in 1994 when he observed that ‘the establishment and exploration of a sense of a national identity is a major preoccupation of English writers of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries’. Turville-Petre's work, which found its most expansive form in his seminal study England the Nation, established medieval English nationalism as a vibrant field of interest, and has led to the proliferation of studies of the development of medieval Englishness over the past decade or so. Important work by scholars such as Siobhain Bly Calkin, Geraldine Heng, and Kathy Lavezzo – amongst others – illustrates the degree to which the study of nationalism has become embedded within the practice of medieval scholarship.

However, the validity of attempting to discern the origins of the English ‘nation’ within the literature of the medieval period has not been without its critics. Can one read the beginnings of English ‘nationalism’ – in the classic Andersonian sense – in such pre-modern texts? Views on the issue have been polarizing: while many scholars have been quick to take up the search for a nascent medieval English national identity, others have remained more cautious. Derek Pearsall, in a response to the profusion of identifications of medieval national sentiment appearing in the late 1990s, comments that ‘while particular circumstances produced a momentary surge in assertions of Englishness around 1290–1340 and again in 1410–20, there was no steadily growing sense of national feeling’. The debate seems – in essence – to be over what medievalists mean when they use terms such as ‘nationalism’ and ‘national identity’: are they implying ‘momentary surges’ or a ‘steadily growing’ sense of national identity? The question of whether nationalism can indeed be identified as a developing discourse in medieval English texts is further complicated by the postulated post-medieval origins of nationalism itself. Benedict Anderson, in his influential Imagined Communities, sums up the view that it was the Enlightenment that engendered nationalism: ‘in Western Europe the eighteenth century marks … the dawn of the age of nationalism’. In response to such periodized objections, medievalists have been quick to dismantle Anderson's temporally-constrained formulation, and have argued for studies on ‘the discourse of the nation’ to be extended back beyond the traditional eighteenth- and nineteenth-century origins of the modern nation state. Diane Speed, arguing the case for the presence of medieval nationalisms in romance, considers ‘that it could be reasonably taken back to the literature of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, especially to the early romances’.