Chapter 6 continues to examine early medieval notions of health and healing by analyzing ways that remedies in Bald’s Leechbook challenge modern conceptions of hearing and deafness. Centering discussion around remedies in the third chapter of Bald’s Leechbook, this chapter brings important work in Deaf studies to bear more directly on our perception of medieval oral/aural culture. Although scholars in Deaf studies have long applied interpretive models from oral theory to analyze the cultural expressivity of signed storytelling, the influence of Deaf studies has yet to be fully felt in the fields of oral theory or Old English studies. A hybrid theoretical approach bridging these two fields productively complicates our understanding of early medieval England as a largely oral/aural culture, and evidence from surviving medical texts, law codes, and the archaeological record indicates a range of sensory perception that seems to have been widely recognized. The entries in Bald’s Leechbook suggest a worldview in which the capacity for hearing, though important, was not assumed. Rather, the faculty of hearing itself is described as changing and changeable, in terms of experience rather than identity. Old English texts describe a variety of circumstances that might temporarily or permanently limit one’s auditory range at any point in one’s life – through such forces as violence, illness, wind, or disease. This chapter’s hybrid approach seeks to broaden our awareness of health and healing beyond a modern medical model and to productively complicate our understanding of both hearing and deafness in pre-modern eras.

This chapter examines the material ways in whichromances were preserved and categorised – ratherthan erased – by early modern readers. The chapterbegins with a discussion of Protestant polemicistswho crafted lists of romance texts to warn readersagainst them. Paradoxically, in doing so suchpolemicists created their own romance canons. Theirbooklists effectively define a genre. This chapterargues that these polemical catalogues expand theearly modern conception of the medieval romancegenre by including new forms, such as thecontinental prose romances gaining popularity in thesixteenth century, along with lighter, comical‘jests’. The chapter also shows that the cataloguesdefined in early modern romance lists reflectmaterial, paratextual decisions made by WilliamCopland, the primary printer of medieval Englishromance in the late sixteenth century. Despite theconsistency of the books included in suchcatalogues, however, the case studies that concludethis chapter – the romance collection detailed inRobert Langham’s letter describing the 1575festivities at Kenilworth and an antiquarianSammelband now housed in the Bodleian Library –demonstrate that early modern romance catalogueswere used to characterise and serve very differenttypes of readers.

This introductory chapter situates this study withinexisting scholarship on the post-Reformationreception of later medieval literature. It definesthe medieval romance genre and explores the variousthreads of the book’s methodology: its interest inperiodisation, memory studies and materiality. Italso introduces the book’s framing metaphors – thecatalogue, the collage, the monument, and the museum– as possible alternatives to the notion of thepalimpsest. The palimpsest is a useful metaphor forunderstanding the relationships between present andpast, as it emphasises materiality and complicatesnotions of linear historical progress and simplechronological development. However, it is easy toforget that the palimpsest is a metaphorfundamentally based on erasure. By focusing on thegenre of romance, Difficult pasts offers analternative to a literary history centred onerasure. The new metaphors explored in this chapterembrace the temporal complexity of the past, butthey also highlight early modern efforts to preserveand engage with, rather than destroy, medievalpredecessors.

I conclude with a summary of what has been learned inthis book by focusing on a final case study of the1517 copy of Robert the Devil housed in the BritishLibrary. I then return to the idea of thepalimpsest, assessing what has been gained throughthis attempt to find narratives that do not rely onerasure. I follow Sarah Dillon in finding value inthe term ‘palimpsestuous’ as a means of moving thepalimpsest metaphor beyond the idea of destruction.Overall, then, Difficult pasts suggests‘palimpsestuous’ codicological metaphors fordescribing the place of the medieval within thepost-Reformation world. It urges us to consider whatremained, rather than what was lost, after theevents of the Protestant Reformation in England. Andit argues that books – and in particular romancebooks – continue to provide a special material siteat which to explore notions of historiographicpresence, distance, continuity and change overtime.

This chapter takes on the metaphor of the ‘monument’and turns from anonymous romance texts to thosecomposed by named authors, in particular by GeoffreyChaucer. As a metaphor, the monument highlightscurated longevity as resistance to erasure.Monuments are crafted in the present to ensure thelong-term memory of a particular version of thepast. Thus, when he invokes Chaucer’s Squire’s Talein Book IV of his Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenserdefines Chaucer’s work as a ‘monument’, albeit onedefaced by time. The idea of the monument, then, isbound up with the idea of the ruin. Thus, Spenserpresents Chaucer as a monumental ruin, one uponwhich he can build for future audiences.Importantly, he does not seek to erase Chaucer, buthe highlights Chaucer’s incompleteness. This chaptercompares Spenser’s treatment of the Squire’s Talewith a less well-known seventeenth-century Squire’sTale composed by poet John Lane, who, like Spenser,uses the romance genre to build upon the ‘ruin’ ofthe past. Exploring both of these authors throughthe framework of the ‘monument’ reveals their variedapproaches to the place of the ‘father of Englishpoetry’ in literary history. Both authors useChaucer’s romance as a monumental foundation uponwhich they might define themselves, Spenser as akindred spirit, a poet, and Lane as an antiquarianscholar interested in restoring what time hasdefaced.