This weighty and handsome volume stands as the culmination of Elizabeth Tyler's work over the last decade and more, documenting and exploring the complex literary landscape of eleventh-century England. She has brought to light the formative importance of women's literary patronage in both court and cloister, in familial and cultural networks that extended across Europe. The texts she examines are shown to be thoroughly embedded in classical learning and allusion, while nonetheless deeply implicated in contemporary politics, and mediated by a complex, multilingual oral culture of formal and informal commentary. Parts of her analysis have appeared (as is acknowledged) in articles published between 2005 and 2013: Early Medieval Europe (2005), Viator (2005), Anglo-Norman Studies (2009), and the Review of English Studies (2013). Followers of Tyler's work will not be surprised by the conclusions offered in this substantial book, but it remains a landmark in scholarship of eleventh-century literature, providing a thorough and commanding picture of the period's culture.
Tyler begins with a chapter on Anglo-Saxon vernacular culture's rich engagement with classical learning and Latinity, moving rapidly from the Alfredian translation program to the fascinating collection of texts in the early eleventh-century Corpus Christi College, Cambridge MS 201. She uses these juxtapositions to argue that “the vernacular literary culture of England was not only in step with but also on the cutting edge of the latest developments in continental Latin literature” (49); not all readers will find this latter claim entirely persuasive, but the learned Latinity of English writings certainly requires no demonstration. She follows with two chapters on the fascinating Encomium Emmae Reginae (c. 1041), exploring first its profound and tendentious engagement with the Aeneid and then the complexity of the text's contingent responses to the unfolding of contemporary politics. She gives careful attention to the question of audience and reception context, with particular reference to the multilingual and deeply factionalized court in which the work was commissioned. Tyler's main interpretive schema is an investigation of the author's self-conscious use of “fiction” to smooth the inconvenient realities of history. The author himself draws a careful, and carefully vague, distinction between falsehood and invention; Tyler observes that since the truth of recent events could not fail to be known to the work's earliest audience, the Encomium’s overt misrepresentations must have registered as culturally active “fictions” in the febrile court. I am not entirely convinced that the word “fiction” is the best term for these phenomena, but the argument as a whole is important and persuasive.
The second text given extended treatment is the Vita Ædwardi (c. 1067), an encomiastic work commissioned by Edward the Confessor's queen Edith, which famously describes itself as forced into a transformation of its artistic purposes by the events of 1066. It is no longer quite true to assert, as Tyler does, that this text has suffered from literary critical neglect (and some recent work is not cited; Robert M. Stein's Reality Fictions: Romance, History, and Governmental Authority, 1025–1180 [2006], for example, appears in the bibliography but nowhere in the footnotes). Tyler's focus here is on the author's use of the Roman story world to give sense and order to English politics across the Norman Conquest. Her discussion attends closely and with revelatory clarity to the tonal shifts involved in the text's movements between prose and poetry, and the author's own pronouncements on the virtues and limitations of each. Tyler's wonderful reading gives the fullest picture yet seen of the Vita Ædwardi’s place within a vast European literary tradition and the author's entirely self-aware deployment of a bewildering array of cultural allusions. The ensuing chapter juxtaposes the Vita with two slightly later works by the Flemish hagiographer Goscelin, written for the community of the royal nunnery at Wilton. Tyler uses these examples to build up a picture of female patrons and audiences as the key determining agencies of this textual landscape. Throughout, she interweaves her deep knowledge of both eleventh-century history and politics and the classical literature in which the works are steeped to produce compelling examples of ancient allusions and contemporary resonance.
In the penultimate chapter Tyler makes good on the argument for the literary centrality of women, by tracing the lives and afterlives of numerous dynastically important women across the conquest—members of the powerful Godwine family and the Anglo-Saxon royal line, alongside their continental counterparts in Normandy, France, and Flanders. These women emerge not only as the subject of literary invention and reinvention, but as patrons and highly educated consumers, creators, and conduits of literary culture. In the final chapter Tyler turns this focus, in extended form, to Edith/Matilda, Henry I's queen descended from the Anglo-Saxon royal line, fêted as the symbolic union of the two dynasties. William of Malmesbury appears here in a new light, not as he depicts himself—as the Latin writer salvaging England's inadequate or lacking historiography for posterity—but rather as the inheritor of a lively and thriving recent tradition.
In a short conclusion, Tyler brings her account of royal women's literary patronage further into the twelfth century, to the beginnings of French historiography and romance. She draws attention to the specific, contingent circumstances that allowed eleventh-century English royal women to play such a forceful role in literary culture—a deep engagement in politics at the highest levels (but without the encumbering daily business of practical governance), combined with the superlative, multilingual literary education and sheer contemplative space afforded by the royal nunneries. Later queens did not have all the same opportunities, but Tyler argues that nonetheless, the influence of those who went before them “put Anglo-Saxon England, though politically dead, at the heart of early-twelfth-century European literary culture” (365). This book is essential reading for scholars of the period, in any discipline.
