Ebook: The Sociology of Middle English Romance: Three Late Medieval Compilers

My dissertation brings a new perspective to the study of Middle English romance by demonstrating how manuscript evidence can both enrich and challenge critical assumptions about the genre. The material form in which romances were encountered in the Middle Ages gives us insight into how its original readers would have encountered the genre. Such evidence should be central to our attempts to place romance within cultural history. My dissertation synthesizes the concerns of cultural history and codicology—disciplines within medieval studies that are not often considered together— by examining four compilations of late medieval romance. In each chapter, I advance an argument about the various textual interpretations suggested by the material form of a single manuscript. In particular, I examine the thematic patterns emerging across the romances within each manuscript. The main line of investigation centers on how the romances in each manuscript are arranged, and how groupings of texts encourage readers of the manuscript to attend to certain issues in the texts. I also take into account how the other (“non-romance”) texts in each manuscript affect the interpretation of each individual romance. Finally, I consider how the romances relate to, reflect and/or refract the specific interests of their compilers and how the social position of each compiler (e.g., his class identity, his regional identity, his political affiliations) shaped the ways in which he collected and preserved his texts. Each manuscript raises a unique set of questions with regards to the romances it contains, ranging from the clash of traditional aristocratic values with mercantile identity (as in Chapter One) to the relationship between largesse and estate management (as in Chapter Four).

Chapter One addresses London, British Library MS Harley 2252, a commonplace book compiled by John Colyns, a merchant in early sixteenth-century London. The romances in this collection were the product of a team of professional book producers, and Colyns purchased these texts and included them at the center of his collection. The rest of the pieces in this manuscript are in Colyns’s hand. Both romances in this collection, Ipomadon and the Stanzaic Morte Arthure, give voice to a traditional social ethic, one which connects virtue with nobility of blood. The pieces Colyns himself copied, by contrast, exhibit a “mercantile” social ethic, based on a model of social mobility through competition. A bibliographical analysis also bears out this contrast between the two romances and the texts written in Colyns’s own hand: Colyns’s own texts are the product of an amateur book producer, the product of one collecting items for personal consumption. The two romances, on the other hand, bear the typical signs of professionally produced books from the fifteenth century. I show, then, that contrasting material forms of these two groups of texts complement their ideological tension.

Chapter Two is a study of Lincoln, Cathedral Library MS 91, an anthology of romances compiled by Robert Thornton, a middling member of the North Yorkshire gentry, over the period 1420-65. Thornton organizes his romances into two distinct units. When read together, the texts in the first section (the Prose Life of Alexander and the Alliterative Morte Arthure) pose challenging questions about the stability of monarchical power. As I demonstrate through a codicological analysis, the placement of these texts at the head of the manuscript was a conscious choice by Thornton with important thematic consequences for his manuscript, for he lived in a world dominated not by the king but by warring noble families in the run-up to the Wars of the Roses. Thus, these texts evincing a “cool distance” from the crown make sense, given the pressures of Thornton’s political situation. A second group of five romances is found in the next section of this manuscript. These texts are less complicated, as they triumphantly celebrate two issues at the heart of gentry life in late medieval England: father-son relationships (mediating concerns over inheritance), coupled with the desire for social mobility (particularly of the landed gentry into the ranks of the titled nobility).

Chapter Three takes up London, British Library MS Additional 31042, also compiled by Robert Thornton. To date, scholars have claimed that the romances in this manuscript intimate a form of affective piety. However, I urge a new direction in our understanding of Thornton’s religiosity by demonstrating that he reserved Lincoln, Cathedral Library MS 91 for more traditionally pious texts, while in the Additional Manuscript he has gathered texts that effect a different religious ethic: in particular, these texts figure forth an aggressive, militaristic Christianity that gains its strength from the suffering of Jews and Moslems.

Chapter Four investigates Princeton, University Library MS Taylor 9, compiled by the Irelands of Hale, a gentry family in fifteenth-century Lancashire. This manuscript contains only three romances, The Awntyrs off Arthure, Sir Amadace, and The Avowing of Arthur. Taken together, these three texts attempt to define and test an aristocratic gift- giving economy, wherein one does not need to reckon costs, and one can give liberally without fear of the supplies drying up. Such attitudes were constitutive of aristocratic ideology in the later Middle Ages; however, these three texts have received scant critical attention, and no one has yet considered how they work in conjunction as a mouthpiece for such an ideology. Furthermore, the records of the manorial court of Hale, which was run by the Irelands, are bound up with these three romances. These court records show the Irelands collecting and tabulating their annual feudal dues from each of their tenants. In conjunction with the romances, which insist on an abundance that is provided by God and does not need to be counted, a significant contrast emerges. In this manuscript, then, ideology comes into contact with the real relations of production.