Chaucerian modernities: (De)-constructing literary history in The Canterbury Tales

Abstract

This article discusses Chaucer’s perspective on the ideological structures that inform the writing of literary history. In the first verses of the Franklin’s Tale, Chaucer first engenders and then deconstructs an – implicit – teleological narrative of literary history that links questions of genre, orality and history only to deconstruct, in almost the same breath, that very narrative by poetic means. Chaucer’s act of historical deconstruction is compared with the self-conscious strategies of raising questions of literary history as they are already to be found in the type of early Middle English romance he parodies in Sir Thopas. As this article argues, it is through this form of poetic meditation on the problems of literary history that Chaucer establishes a sense of his own modernity.

Literary history is perhaps one of the most difficult subdisciplines of literary studies, not least because the vastness and varieties of its subject defy easy synthesis. Consequently, most present-day attempts to produce definitive, large-scale literary histories tend to avoid the traditional format of a single, coherent emplotment, opting, instead, for multi-author collections of individual essays dealing with specific, more or less well-defined phenomena within a certain period or number of periods. The categories according to which such entries are selected may vary considerably, with examples ranging from ‘Alliterative poetry’ (Hanna, 1999) to ‘Vox populi and the literature of 1381’ (Aers, 1999). Few and far between are magisterial historical syntheses, such as Simpson’s classic Reform and Cultural Revolution (2002), that seek to encompass the central trajectories of a given literary period’s historical transformations.

Certainly, one reason for the now all-but-established pattern in writing literary history is the fact that the relevant topics themselves have become so multifarious and the research on them so extensive and specialised, that it makes sense, if only for purely practical reasons, to draw on a number of scholars, each for their particular expertise. At the same time, the idea of producing an overarching synthesis, of creating an all-encompassing narrative itself raises anxieties, as do the concepts on which such a history must inevitably be based, notions such as ‘change’ or ‘development’, for instance. For the last three decades or so, the intellectual climate has not been particularly kind to the fundamental ideas that have traditionally served to bind literary history together, or to make possible a long-range narrative of the developmental patterns informing literary history. Both postcolonial approaches and queer studies, to name only two especially prominent examples, have called into question the usefulness of many of the received modes of viewing history. Categories such as ‘change’ and ‘development’ have been rendered suspect by the teleological projects for which they have frequently been put to use. To quote only Chakrabarty’s famous critique of ‘historicism’ (2000: 7):

Historicism is what made modernity or capitalism look not simply global but rather as something that became global over time, by originating in one place (Europe) and then spreading outside it. This “first in Europe, then elsewhere” structure of global historical time was historicist.

Chakrabarty’s criticism is directed at notions of history – as we find them in modernisation theory, for example, or in recent accounts of globalisation – that implicitly or explicitly establish a Western/Eurocentric concept of modernity as the yardstick against which all historical development is measured. Such an approach inevitably results in a state of affairs where phenomena existing in the same time frame but in different socio-cultural contexts are placed on different levels of a developmental hierarchy. As Chakrabarty (2000: 7) has pointed out: ‘Historicism thus posited historical time as a measure of the cultural distance (at least in institutional development) that was assumed to exist between the West and the non-West’. The crucial problem resulting from this type of Western historical perspective, that is, that cultural difference is cast as a difference of epoch and period, has been aptly termed the ‘denial of coevalness’ by Fabian (2002: 31).

Fundamental critiques of the modes and principles of writing literary history are by no means a recent phenomenon; they date back to the Middle Ages, at the very least. As I shall argue in the following, these are problems the late Middle English poet Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1340–1400) was extremely aware of. In fact, as I hope to demonstrate, it is through a sustained critical engagement with the underlying narrative and epistemological structures that would later help to put in place modernity’s standard narratives of literary history that Chaucer establishes his very own sense of ‘modernity’. The example from the Canterbury Tales I will focus on is the beginning of the Franklin’s Tale, which I shall juxtapose with some observations on early Middle English romances. Instead of offering in-depth interpretations of the texts themselves, I shall concentrate on the specific passages that engage with the epistemological foundations and implications of literary history.

At the beginning of Chaucer’s Franklin’s Tale in the Canterbury Tales, we are presented with a fascinating spotlight on literary history as an (implicitly) developmental and ultimately supersessionist history of literary media, a history astonishingly similar to the ones that have prevailed until quite recently – and in some cases even to this very day. What Chaucer’s narrator, the upwardly mobile and (ostensibly) culturally conservative Franklin offers us here, is not simply a narrative of literary history per se, but rather an ironic meditation on such a narrative; or, to be more precise, a witty poetic meta-narrative that calls into question the very possibility of writing literary history:

Thise olde gentil Britouns in hir dayes

Of diverse aventures maden layes,

Rymeyed in hir firste Briton tonge,

Whiche layes with hir instrumentz they songe

Or elles redden hem for hir plesaunce;

And oon of hem have I in remembraunce,

Which I shal seyn with good wyl as I kan.

The Canterbury Tales, Fragment V, ll. 709–715 ¹

Modern English translation:

These gentle Bretons in their days

Composed lays [brief romances] about all manner of adventures,

Rhymed in their original Breton language,

Which lays they sang accompanied by their instruments

Or else read them for their pleasure;

And one of them I remember

Which I will recite with goodwill, to the best of my abilities. ²

At first glance, these lines resemble a highly conventional introduction to a fairly early – that is, pre-1350 – Middle English romance in the style of the Auchinleck Manuscript, for instance. ³ Designating itself as a Breton lay, the text invokes the image of a bygone age of poetic creativity, one where bards composed and recited in a mode closely resembling that which modern scholars would call ‘oral-formulaic’. The nostalgia thus engendered is astonishingly coherent: it links a particular genre – romance – with a particular form of presentation – oral recital, accompanied by music, and potentially oral composition – with a particular language – the Celtic language spoken by the ancient Bretons. In other words, Chaucer’s comments are not merely nostalgic in a general sense but, through their historical specificity, conjure up a quasi-ethnographic image of literary history, where particular versions of linguistic, cultural and poetic alterity converge to form a seamless whole.

The resulting historical image is by no means Chaucer’s invention. On the contrary, in the Lay le Freine, a romance contained in the Auchinleck Manuscript, we see the story embedded in a very similar narrative of literary history. ⁴

We redeþ oft & findeþ ywrite,

& þis clerkes wele it wite,

layes þat ben in harping

ben yfounde of ferli þing.

Sum beþe of wer & sum of wo,

and sum of ioie & mirþe also,

& sum of trecherie & of gile,

of old auentours þat fel while;

[…]

In Breteyne bi hold time

þis layes were wrouʒt, so seiþ þis rime.

When kinges miʒt our yhere

of ani meruailes þat þer were,

þai token an harp in gle & game,

& maked a lay & ʒaf it name.

Now of þis auentours þat weren yfalle

y can tel sum ac nouʒt alle. ⁵

Modern English translation:

We often read and find written,

And learned clerks know it well,

Lays about wondrous things

That are found in the context of harping.

Some are about war and some about woe,

And some about joy and mirth, too,

And some about treachery and guile

About old adventures that happened long ago;

[…]

In Brittany in old times

These lays were made – so says this rhyme,

When kings might hear anywhere

Of marvels that there were,

They took a harp in joy and minstrelsy

And made a lay and gave it a name.

Now of these adventures that befell

I can tell some, but not all.

What is more, these lines are not even unique to the Lay le Freine: almost exactly the same passage as in the Lay le Freine occurs in a manuscript of the Middle English romance Sir Orfeo, a text which is also to be found in the Auchinleck Manuscript; though the Auchinleck version of the text lacks the lines quoted here. ⁶ In its depiction of the oral-formulaic nature of ancient Celtic poetic composition, and also in the social context it constructs for that poetic practice, the Lay le Freine goes beyond Chaucer’s clichéd vision. Not only do we see the poets grab their harps and compose directly whenever they are overcome by the creative urge, but it is the ancient kings themselves who are happy to indulge in this kind of poetic pleasure.

But Chaucer would not have been Chaucer if he had simply borrowed historical stereotypes of the kind to be found in the Auchinleck Manuscript without re-fashioning them in a critical mode of his own. ⁷ A closer look at his adaptation of this ethnographic cliché reveals a sceptical approach to literary history not overtly present in his sources. Chaucer does not voice his scepticism explicitly, but performatively, that is, through aesthetic means. The first four lines of the Franklin’s Tale’s beginning are marked by a stately, almost sedate quality that derives, amongst other things, from a high frequency of words containing a combination of a liquid or nasal with another consonant, which I highlight here in bold print: o ld e, ge nt il, Britou ns , ave nt ures, Brito n t o ng e, i nstr ume ntz , so ng e. The dignified rhythm resulting from this sound-pattern transports listeners to an aesthetic universe where all poetic production was accompanied by the harp, and, if we are to believe the passage’s equivalent in the Lay le Freine, monarchs themselves did not hesitate to compose narratives in verse. Yet, as soon as we reach the fifth line, the stately rhythm comes to an abrupt end: ‘Or elles redden hem for hir plesaunce’. The previous rhythmic pattern is supplanted by a staccato of short <e>- and <schwa>-sounds which not only puts a radical stop to the nostalgic soundscape but simultaneously emphasises the sudden change in the underlying media history that is being represented. All at once, we realise that, in the Franklin’s version of Ancient Britain, the time-honoured oral mode of reception apparently already existed side-by-side with a far more modern one, that of silent reading. Thus, the machine-gun-like patter of line five lends auditory support to a revisionist interpretation of literary history and, concomitantly, of the history of literary media, and posits a historical simultaneity of Celtic orality with supposedly more advanced practices of reading and recital. In an almost cynical move, line five undermines the carefully constructed nostalgia of the four preceding ones – and, more importantly, it calls into question the media history that goes with it. If the ancient Bretons were fully capable of switching at will from their age-old practice of oral composition and reception to a fully literate system of poetic communication, then the basic developmental terms of that older model of media history must inevitably collapse. When all is said and done, the ancient Bretons, Chaucer – or rather: the Franklin – seems to be suggesting, were not so very different from the highly literate intellectuals of his own day. ⁸ In other words: those ancient Bretons themselves were already selling the image of the oral poet as part of a nostalgic imaginary unrelated to the material realities of their media-world. In as much as Chaucer reveals the constructedness of the nostalgic image of literary history embedded in the romance-tradition, he turns into something like an Eric Hobsbawm avant la lettre, implicitly positing that tradition is always already invented.

It does not really come as a surprise that Chaucer should have been capable of debunking the image of the oral bard constructed in medieval romance as a historical stereotype. After all, as Frank (1993) has shown, the ancient bard strumming his harp had already been part and parcel of an Old English literary tradition that drew for inspiration on Isidore of Seville. ⁹ Indeed, the ancient bard and his oral composition are a stereotype the Middle Ages inherited from late antiquity. To be explicit, this is not an attempt to deny the importance of oral-derived forms of literature in the Middle Ages or before; rather, I am making a point with respect to established narratives of literary history. Chaucer’s texts seem to indicate that the patterns of literary history evolved from traditional poetic practices that display an impressive awareness both of their traditionality and of the ways in which that traditionality can be turned into a traditionalism self-consciously staged in the service of meta-poetic purposes. Indeed, this is particularly true of the narrative stagings of oral performance in Middle English romance. In Middle English romances, depictions of the texts’ supposedly oral performance have often been adduced as evidence of the degree to which these early texts – such as the so-called Matter of England-romances – were direct products of a primarily oral culture. ¹⁰

The ideologically charged issue of orality versus literacy in medieval (and ancient) literature will be touched on here only very briefly; it would certainly deserve a decidedly more detailed treatment. In the present context, the question will be dealt with only insofar that it has a certain bearing on the problem of Chaucer’s understanding of literary history. Suffice it to say that in the context of Middle English romance, these traces of orality were often seen as one more piece of evidence of the texts’ lack of literary sophistication. Thus, Kane’s (1951: 50) assessment of the Matter-of-England romance Bevis of Hamtoun perfectly encapsulates the negative perception of early Middle English romance as it long held sway amongst critics:

[Bevis] has a better effect than its component material would seem to warrant, for this almost formless story, with its miracles and marvels, ranting Saracens and dragons, is told without any polish or skill in a style generously padded and tagged, with little sense of poetic or narrative art, and still the romance is more than merely readable. As with Horn and Havelok we tolerate its artistic crudity for the sake of the company of the hero and heroine, Beues and Iosiane, who reflect the warm humanity of the imagination that created them.

In contrast, Fewster (1987), using Guy of Warwick as her prime example, has demonstrated in her in-depth study of the formulaic style employed in many Middle English romances that certain characteristics which older research would automatically have associated with – especially early – Middle English romance’s fundamental lack of sophistication do in fact bear witness to a highly developed sense of literary self-consciousness:

Far from being a style, limited by its evolution through oral transmission, romance style develops its own literary language in which continual references to its transmission are a part of this romance style’s emphasis on its own history. Middle English romance is a sophisticated genre which uses a single set of intertextual markers to create meaning in different ways. (Fewster, 1987: 150–151)

Fewster paints a paradoxical picture. In her view, the romances’ apparent limitations – many of which derive from oral transmission – make it possible for them to develop an intertextuality of their own, resulting in a literary aesthetic strategically exploiting its traditionality in terms of a self-conscious traditionalism, that is, a form of generic self-referentiality. What makes Fewster’s analysis so trenchant is the way in which she turns the genre’s much-maligned ‘supposed’ weaknesses into an instrument of literary sophistication.

And yet, at the same time, Fewster sees orality still operating first and foremost as a restrictive influence, a set of conditions that affects the genre’s development through limitation more than anything else. By contrast, Kabir (2001) has taken the matter a step further, focusing less on the apparent limitations that oral traditions impose on the Matter-of-England-romances, and conceiving of them instead as an aesthetic device deliberately wielded in order to produce poetic meaning. According to Kabir (2001), the traces of orality in Middle English romance must themselves be seen as an aesthetic effect that could never have existed except in conditions of highly developed literacy. One important piece of evidence in this respect is constituted by the texts’ remarkable mismatch between the ways in which they style themselves as instances of oral performance, and what she calls ‘a narratorial voice that resonates with our understanding of the fictionality of medieval literature as a consequence of its increasing writtenness’ (Kabir, 2001: 20). Referring especially to Havelok, she urges readers to ‘reassess the formulaic style, thematic concerns, and realism […] as manifestations of a feigned orality’ (2001: 20). This feigned orality is employed in the service of a non-courtly aesthetic paradoxically catering to an aristocratic audience that derives considerable satisfaction from deliberate ventures into a literary non-courtliness. Kabir’s analysis of Havelok can easily be extended to the other Matter of England-romances and, in many respects, to Middle English romance in general. One need only think of the fabliaux to find a similar instance of a genre produced for a courtly audience that, from a modern perspective, looks decidedly uncourtly. After all, according to the manuscript evidence, it is for the entertainment of an aristocratic audience that the fabliaux’ bourgeois characters indulge in their non-courtly activities. As Kabir (2001: 21–22) has shown, the early Middle English Havelok, as compared with its Anglo-Norman sources, deliberately increases its ‘oral’ and folktale elements. In other words, the traces of orality and of a folk-tale sensibility in the Middle English Havelok constitute deliberate aesthetic moves in the service of making the text appear more traditional and more ancient.

What is of particular interest in the context of the present article is the way Havelok evokes the idea of an oral performance in its introductory verses:

Herkneth to me, gode men –

Wives, maydnes, and alle men –

Of a tale that ich you wile telle,

Who so it wile here and therto dwelle.

The tale is of Havelok imaked:

Whil he was litel, he yede ful naked.

Havelok was a ful god gome –

He was ful god in everi trome;

He was the wicteste man at nede

That thurte riden on ani stede.

That ye mowen now yhere,

And the tale you mowen ylere,

At the beginnig of ure tale,

Fil me a cuppe of ful god ale;

And wile drinken, her I spelle,

That Crist us shilde alle fro helle.

Krist late us hevere so for to do

That we moten comen Him to;

And, witthat it mote ben so,

Benedicamus Domino!

Here I schal biginnen a rym;

Krist us yeve wel god fyn!

The rym is maked of Havelok –

A stalworthi man in a flok.

He was the stalwortheste man at nede

That may riden on ani stede.

(Havelok, 1 –26) ¹¹

Modern English translation:

Listen to me, good people –

Wives, maidens, and all men –

To a tale that I will tell,

Whoever wishes to listen to it and sit it out,

The tale is made about Havelok:

When he was little, he went entirely naked.

Havelok was an entirely good man,

He was entirely good in every company,

He was the bravest man in time of need,

That was able to ride on any steed.

That you may hear now,

And the tale you may learn,

At the beginning of our tale,

Fill me a cup of good ale,

And, while drinking, I will tell a story,

That Christ may protect all from Hell.

Christ let us ever do in such wise

That we may come to him;

And, in order for it to be so,

Benedicamus Domino.

Here I will begin a rhyme,

Christ provide us with a good end!

The rhyme is made about Havelok,

The strongest man in all the flock,

He was the strongest man in time of need,

That was able to ride on any steed.

One particularly significant instance of this feigned orality is to be found in the narrator’s calling for a cup of ale. In so doing, these lines draw attention to the performance, inserting an element that might easily be absent when the tale is read, be it to a live audience or be it at an individual’s silent reading of it, where there can obviously be no performer actually demanding a beverage. Consequently, as theorists of medieval fictionality have argued, this kind of device draws attention to the fictionality of the text’s performance, to the potential discrepancies existing between what the text says about itself and the specific conditions in which it is read or performed in a given situation. ¹² And as though the poem were attempting to stress the workings of this device, in its conclusion it is at pains to emphasise its fundamentally written nature, for instance, by reminding the audience of those many sleepless nights that went into its composition, thereby also implicitly stressing the fact that the person reciting the poem is not, in fact, identical with the poet:

Forthi ich wolde biseken you

That haven herd the rim nu,

That ilke of you, with gode wille,

Saye a Pater Noster stille

For him that haveth the rym maked,

And ther-fore fele nihtes waked,

That Jesu Crist his soule bringe

Biforn his Fader at his endinge. (2994 –3001)

Modern English translation:

Therefore I beseech you

That heaven heard this rhyme,

That each one of you, with good will,

Will silently say the Lord’s Prayer

For the one who made this rhyme,

And therefore stayed awake many nights,

That Jesus Christ bring his soul

Before his Father when his end is come.

While the performer refers to himself in the first person singular – ‘ich’ – he uses the third person to identify the poet – ‘him that haveth the rym maked’. The audience is thus alerted to the fact that the identities of the performer, the narrator and the empirical author are distinct, or at least, that they can be distinct. As the text switches between different pronouns, it prises apart, epistemologically, the empirical moment of extra-textual poetic production and its own potential performative rendition before an audience.

From what has been said so far, it is clear that early Middle English romance possessed an impressive degree of literary self-consciousness. This can be observed in the ways in which the texts in question highlight their own fictionality, for instance by making use both of elaborate schemes of staging oral poetic forms and a style of narrative traditionality/traditionalism that they expect their audience to understand as a carefully constructed effect rather than as mimetic proof of their primitivism. While not all Middle English romances display these characteristics to the same extent and with equal sophistication, the self-reflexive aesthetic option was certainly a possibility that poets were capable of drawing on. There is no doubt that these early romances are marked by a thoroughly medieval poetics, a poetics intent on deriving its notion of its particular fictionality and, hence, its literariness, from the rhetorical and narrative traditions of pre-modernity and from within the media-contexts of its time.

At this point in our argument, we appear to have reached something of an impasse. If early Middle English romance was really capable of such a highly developed literary self-awareness, one that it expressed amongst other things by self-consciously playing with its own fictionalised orality, then why does Chaucer’s Franklin find it necessary to deconstruct the feigned orality of medieval romance at all? Why such an elaborate staging of the act of deconstruction, if the poetic practice thus subjected to ironic scrutiny is always already part of a sophisticated fiction meant to be understood as such?

In answer to this question, one might argue that precisely because Chaucer’s deconstruction of early romance orality is designed as such a carefully stage-managed effect, it constitutes an elegantly self-reflexive gesture. He thereby doffs his cap to the only English literary tradition he has inherited, implicitly stressing the quality and importance of his insular literary forebears who, at first glance, tended to make a rather modest impression in comparison with those other literary traditions Chaucer primarily makes use of, namely classical and medieval Latin, French and Italian sources. Through his act of poetic deconstruction, Chaucer would thus be paying tribute to an English literary tradition which, in the absence of a literary meta-discourse of its own, was capable of celebrating its triumphs only implicitly, that is, through the self-reflexivity inherent in its poetic devices and aesthetic patterns. The Latin traditions of Ovid and Virgil or of Alan of Lille and Geoffrey of Vinsauf, the French tradition of the Roman de la Rose, Guillaume de Machaut and Eustache Deschamps, and not least the Italian tradition of Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio all possessed some kind of language of literary criticism; Middle English romance, by contrast, had at its disposal no literary meta-language other than that embedded in its forms and structures and the ways in which these were employed. ¹³

In fact, this is a point Chaucer also makes at the beginning of the first of the two tales he assigns to himself in the Canterbury Tales, the Tale of Sir Thopas, which comes to an abrupt end when it is rudely cut off by Harry Bailly. Here, we see Chaucer stage a dramatic intervention – as we see him do in the Monk’s Tale, too: such a procedure is a means of alerting the audience to underlying complexities that may stand in stark opposition to what seems to be going on at the surface level. After all, while the Tale of Sir Thopas both looks and sounds ridiculous in so many ways, borrowing all kinds of elements from (early) medieval romance, its stanzaic form emulates those celestial harmonies that, according to both classical and medieval thinking, informed the very structure of the universe (Burrow, 1971; Jones, 2000). Even as Harry Bailly complains of the text’s ‘drasty ryming’, ¹⁴ an analysis of the mathematical principles that the stanzas are based on reveals the subtle elegance through which its supposed failure has been devised. By putting an end to the narrative, it is Harry Bailly himself who, unwittingly, puts the finishing touch to the numerical scheme that organises the stanzas. ¹⁵

It is no coincidence, then, that, at the beginning of the Tale of Sir Thopas, Chaucer provides a catalogue of six Middle English romances, half of which belong to the Matter of England-genre, that is, to the one subgenre of Middle English romance that is most ostentatiously ‘English’ as far as content is concerned: ‘Horn child’ (King Horn), ‘Beves’ (Bevis of Hamptoun) and ‘sir Gy’ (Guy of Warwick).

Men speken of romances of prys,

Of Horn child and of Ypotys,

Of Beves and sir Gy,

Of sir Lybeux and Pleyndamour –

But sir Thopas, he bereth the flour

Of roial chivalry

Canterbury Tales, Fragment VII, ll. 897 –902

Modern English translation:

People speak of excellent romances,

Of King Horn and Ypotys,

Of Bevis [of Hamptoun] and Sir Guy [of Warwick],

Of Sir Lybeaus [Desconus] and Pleyndamour –

But Sir Thopas bears the flower [i.e. ‘is the most renowned representative’]

Of royal chivalry

By listing these texts, I argue, Chaucer not only establishes an English literary genealogy for himself but also names something like a point of origin, a moment in history which marks the beginning of a self-conscious English literary history. And in so doing, his poetic historiography resonates, to a certain extent, with a particularly ambitious attempt to interpret the historical trajectory of Middle English literature.

In his influential study, The Grounds of English Literature (2004), Cannon suggests that early Middle English literature, that is, the vernacular texts written in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries – including idiosyncratic compositions such as the Orrmulum or The Owl and the Nightingale – betray a distinct quality of aesthetic individuality and experimental uniqueness. According to Cannon, that quality gets lost when, with the rise of romance, the concept of genre and a concomitant sense of the ‘literariness’ of literature become entrenched in Middle English writing. Notions such as ‘genre’ and ‘literariness’, Cannon argues, impose considerable limitations on the range of expression and experimentation available to Middle English literature from c. 1300 onwards (2004: 3–15, 172–209). One of the reasons why Cannon’s interpretation has proven so persuasive is because it purports, in unabashedly Hegelian terms, to explain the process of how a literary self-consciousness comes into being in England. Before the ascendancy of romance as the prime vernacular secular genre, he suggests, Middle English literature lived in a near-prelapsarian world of aesthetic and intellectual immediacy where each and every text occupied a unique position of its own, unfettered by poetic tradition, generic expectations or aesthetic rules. As a generic concept, romance destroys the innocence of thirteenth-century literary anarchy by injecting into England’s poetic universe the twin germs of generic identity and literary self-reflexivity. If carried to the extreme, this interpretation of Middle English literary history would imply that the earliest Matter of England-romances may not yet have known they constituted such a thing as ‘literature’, or else that, if they did, then they belonged to the very earliest texts beginning to develop such a form of self-consciousness. And these are the ones Chaucer alludes to in Sir Thopas while also drawing on their constructions of literary history at the beginning of the Franklin’s Tale.

What matters for our analysis is that his reading constitutes a rare theoretically informed attempt to conceive of the development of early Middle English literature on the basis of an historicist understanding of the notion of literariness itself, the changing nature of which, as Patterson (1987) has argued in an incisive critique of the New Historicism, must be central to any historically informed approach to literary studies: ‘[A] correlative historical category that literary scholars cannot really do without is that of literature itself. That this is a historical category is beyond dispute, and that its boundaries, definitions, and purposes change over time is also true’ (1987: 74).

While Cannon’s perspective avoids the pitfalls of an essentialist claim to medieval otherness, it does build on something akin to the topos of the Fall and the radical division between ‘before’ and ‘after’, between a state of innocence and one of self-consciousness, which that topos frequently entails, especially when deployed for the linked purposes of periodisation and historiographical narrative. ¹⁶ Thus, even as he seeks to undermine the received teleological narrative of English literary history, he appears to be adhering to a powerful grand récit of his own. After all, Cannon’s close-to-idyllic image of a period in (literary) history when each and every literary work was unique, existing in glorious isolation without being pressed into a historiographical grid informed by normative standards of aesthetic judgement, has a prelapsarian quality to it that ought to raise suspicion. Cannon conjures the nostalgic spirit of a time when there were neither genres nor notions of the literary, but merely texts. But only as long as one studies twelfth- and thirteenth-century English literature in isolation, does this teleological notion look tempting. As soon as we remember the multi-lingual situation of England’s high medieval literary field, things start to appear more complex, because then we realise that Middle English texts always existed in close proximity with texts in French and Latin that provided other perspectives on what literature was and how it could be understood. Arguing that particular forms of literary self-consciousness were absent before the rise of romance is to divorce Middle English literature from the larger cultural context it was embedded in; a cultural and literary context fully capable of presenting sophisticated notions of the literary. It is quite likely, therefore, that the Early Middle English texts Cannon foregrounds possessed a form of consciousness of their being part of some larger tradition of the literary and that their isolation is more imagined than anything else.

At the beginning of the Franklin’s Tale, but equally so in Sir Thopas, Chaucer appears to be grappling with a literary history very much along the lines expounded by Cannon. As he deconstructs the antediluvian fantasy of a purely oral literature, he echoes but also parodies those early romances that constituted the only vernacular literary tradition with a sense of its own literariness that Chaucer could draw on. But he also seems to be going one step further: precisely because he reveals that the historical image presented by these romances is not, first and foremost, an accurate rendition of literary history, but rather part of an elaborate aesthetic strategy in the service of staging the self-conscious literariness of early English romance, he calls into question the very concept of literary history, especially if it is grounded in a teleological account of the evolution of literary genres and literary media. Playing off aesthetics against history, Chaucer forces us to ponder whether literary history is at all possible – or even desirable. Given Chaucer’s impressive understanding of historical change and alterity in literary matters – as displayed in nearly all his works, in one way or another – such a decidedly anti-historicist move can only ever be understood as being executed tongue-in-cheek. What the irony inherent in Chaucer’s anti-historicist stance betrays is an acute sense of the ideological costs involved in establishing a notion of modernity.