Beginnings of the study of Middle English

Traditionally, the start of Middle English is dated in 1066 with the Norman Conquest and its finish in 1485 with the accession of Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch. Both dates are political and historical, and the events they represent may have an impact on the development of the English language in the longer term but they are hardly appropriate as guides to the dating of periods in it. In any case language does not change as abruptly as such stark dates would suggest and the whole matter of when Middle English began and ended depends on the features which are regarded as significant in marking a change in the language. The period is called ‘Middle’ English because it falls between Old and Modern English. To most people today Middle English has seemed closer to Modern than to Old English for a variety of reasons. Perhaps the most important of these has been the influence of Geoffrey Chaucer. His reputation as the ‘Father of English Poetry’ has meant that many people have some familiarity with Middle English through his writings. More importantly, his work has been almost constantly available since Caxton issued the editio princeps of The Canterbury Tales in 1476. Each subsequent century has seen its great editor of Chaucer (Ruggiers 1984) and these editors have kept Chaucer and Middle English very much in the public eye. The only other author who comes anywhere near Chaucer in this respect is Malory, whose Le Morte Darthur was published several times in the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries.

Introduction

The title of this chapter, ‘The literary language’, suggests that there is a clear division between literary and non-literary languages in the Middle English period. As is true of any period in English, there exists a highly literary style at one end of the spectrum and an equally clear non-literary style at the other end, but in between there are so many gradations that it is difficult to draw a precise boundary between them. One can, however, say that if one were to attempt to draw such a boundary, it would for the Middle English period be drawn in a rather different place from the one which we would recognise as appropriate for the modern situation. Today literature is traditionally regarded as both an exclusive and an evaluative term; works which lack an aesthetic structure or an emotional appeal are readily dismissed as being not literature. The growth of a book-buying market has led to literature being advertised and sold as something quite separate from other printed material. The word literature comes ultimately from Latin littera, ‘that which is written’, and this definition reflects Middle English attitudes to literature more adequately than contemporary ones do, though the beginnings of a modern attitude can be traced at the end of the medieval period. It is in the fifteenth century that literary texts like the Canterbury Tales begin to be produced by themselves in de luxe manuscripts as though they were special texts which needed a specialized form of reading. Until that time, and in most cases long afterwards as well, literary texts appeared with other written material in compendia of one type or another. What we would now classify as literary texts do not have a different status in presentation or format.