In asking where Jocelyn Wogan-Browne's interest in the interrelation of differing languages began, we might start with a small Australian girl on roller skates gliding (because how can we imagine Jocelyn otherwise?) along the pavement in a Melbourne suburb, singing out ‘Buongiorno!’ to an Italian neighbour and then being mortified when he replied because – already voluble, no doubt – she had reached the limits of her vocabulary. Or with the child who longed to go to high school and learn French, wondering if the French alphabet also began with ABC – or was it perhaps DEF? – and who, when she finally found out, was pelted with pebbles by the other children for of course getting 100% in the French exam. Or later winning a scholarship to a private school where she could learn Latin and German in addition to French. Or, when she got to the Melbourne University English department, encountering Old Norse, taught by Ian Maxwell, who was as charismatic a lecturer as she herself would become in her turn. Or, after graduating in English as the top student of her year, using her spare time to learn Greek while teaching in order to pay off her student loans (Italian had to wait another twenty years or so). No doubt her Greek accent is as impeccable as all the rest. Jocelyn's fascination with other languages must have been underpinned by what was, in the 1950s and beyond, a peculiarly antipodean nostalgia for Europe, for poems about May reverdies that you had never seen and birdsong that you had never heard. Ignoring the place-names of the Melbourne area – Moorabbin, Ivanhoe, Heidelberg West – she remembers poring over maps of England as a child and asking herself how a place like Ashby de la Zouch could ever have got its peculiarly hybrid name: a uniquely Wogan-Browne variant of what Australians used to call the ‘colonial cringe’.

Jocelyn's origins are not simply English, though, but European: her mother’s family had come to Australia from Germany (her scientist grandfather was a native German speaker) and her father's from Ireland. Donald Wogan-Browne was a commander in the Royal Australian Navy and was often away; when he left the service, around the time Jocelyn started at Melbourne University, he and Jocelyn's mother, Geraldine, took up dairy farming.

The writing lives of the Scottish poets Robert Henryson, William Dunbar and Gavin Douglas overlapped during a period of fifty years or so, from around 1460 to 1513, coinciding with the reigns of James III and IV of Scotland. The two younger poets – Dunbar was about fifteen years older than Douglas – came to maturity at the end of the fifteenth century in a literary milieu in which Henryson had been the great innovator of the previous generation, as they were to be the great innovators of theirs. They had all stopped writing by the end of 1513, it seems. By then Henryson had been dead for ten or twelve years; Dunbar simply drops from the records; while Douglas completed his translation of the Aeneid in July 1513 and wrote no more poetry.

Scottish literature – that is, writings in the variety of English spoken in the lowlands of Scotland – begins later than south of the border, or at least has a different pattern of survival. There is very little earlier than Barbour’s Bruce, written in the 1370s, but a rapid flowering took place in the fifteenth century as knowledge of English writers – including Chaucer, Gower, Lydgate and the anonymous alliterative poets – spread into Scotland. The Kingis Quair, the first Scots philosophical dream-vision in the Chaucerian manner, was apparently composed in the late 1420s or 1430s by James I, who was held captive in England for eighteen years. Richard Holland’s Buke of the Howlat, written around 1448, is the earliest long poem of the alliterative ‘revival’ in Scotland; it is a ‘parliament of birds’ fable cast in the form of a chanson d’aventure. Nevertheless, the originality of Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas is of a different order. They were all highly educated men who thought hard and came to different conclusions about what poetry is and does. Between them, they created Older Scots as a literary language.

Childhood as an object of study has been seen as the creation of Philippe Ariès (1914–84), a French agricultural development expert by profession and free-lance historian in his spare time. His L’Enfant et la vie familiale sous l’Ancien Régime, first published in 1960, was issued two years later in English, under the misleading title Centuries of Childhood – misleading because to English-speaking readers it appeared to be a study of childhood in isolation, rather than a study of the child in the family. Where other historians of the family have sought to identify the development of affectivity primarily by studying the relations between husband and wife, Ariès, unconstrained by the conventions of professional academic history, had the brilliant idea of tracing changes in family structures via the emotional relations between parents and children.

The book was an attempt to answer the question whether the idea of the family has diminished in the face of the twin processes of modernization and industrialization as divorce, once unknown, proliferates and parental authority is eroded. Ariès’s answer is that as ‘a value, a theme of expression, an occasion of emotions’, the family only arrived in the early nineteenth century. Physical changes in domestic housing allowed the modern nuclear family, which Ariès sees as emerging at this period, to cut itself off from the world. Publicness, defined as sociability, is therefore held to characterize the Ancien Régime, while privacy, defined as the retreat into the home and into self-sufficient family relationships, is seen as a modern condition.

Privacy now is ideological: it gives priority to the particularistic relations between parents and children which are a hallmark of modernity. For Ariès, the pre-modern family is an institution for securing the continuation of the patrimony, for providing training in conduct and thereby inculcating respect for the good order of society. None of this requires the emotional bonds between its members that characterize the modern family, which understands itself as organized round its love for the children. Ariès generally acknowledges that parents loved their children in the pre-modern era, but argues that parental love was not thought of as a defining feature of family life.

Prestige, authority and power: what is the significance of these three terms for the study of medieval manuscripts and texts? This is the question that the authors of the essays in this volume, ranging from the twelfth century to the sixteenth, have sought to address, and they answer it in different, but interrelated, ways. The essays are presented in chronological order, and in this way fall into four groups. The first two, by Suzanne Reynolds and Kantik Ghosh, discuss ideas of textual authority. The second pair, by Kate Harris and Kathleen Scott, are detailed studies of some de luxe manuscripts of the early fifteenth century, and present differing views about the patronage of one of these in particular. The third group, by John Thompson, Carol Meale and Anne Dutton, deals with prestigious fifteenth-century writers and readers of manuscripts and texts. The focus of the last group, by Mary Erler, James Carley and David Carlson, is on manuscripts in the era of print, during the reign of Henry VIII. Nevertheless the ideas of prestige, authority and power cut across this ordering and suggest different juxtapositions as well, as I shall show.

Prestige is probably the least problematic of the three terms; in fact, the idea that manuscripts are a source of prestige in the late Middle Ages seems so self-evidently true as to be hardly worth discussing. Written on parchment, opulently illuminated and handsomely bound, expensive manuscripts made for wealthy individuals or institutions were constituents of status; they belong with the equally fine horses, clothes, jewels and other luxury goods that were essential to aristocratic self-presentation, whether secular or religious. De luxe manuscripts of various kinds are the ones non-specialists are most familiar with: they are on display in exhibitions and in museums; they are tourist attractions; they offer themselves as static icons of prestige.

If the prestigious manuscript is familiar, so is the authoritative one. The idea that an auctor (author) was endowed with auctoritas (authority) through the way the text was presented on the manuscript page is now thoroughly familiar. It was initially an academic process: the scholarly commentaries and glosses that accrued to the ‘set texts’ used in grammar schools were the material means by which this kind of cultural status was constituted.

The purpose of this essay is to look at Middle English romances from the perspective of private life. It sets them in the context of late medieval patterns of family and marriage, and presents them as part of a literate but unlearned lay culture centered on the home, where many of them seem to belong. It does not provide a survey, because that has already been done several times, but rather, by looking at around half-a-dozen, suggests a new approach.

The late medieval family can be thought of in two ways. First, as a group of people living together in the “nuclear family household” formation consisting of wife, husband and dependent children, whose home would also include servants and apprentices. The nuclear family, then as now, is always in process, because it comes into being with a marriage and is reshaped by the children’s departure. Another way of thinking about the family, though, is as a lineage that is the route for the transmission of property and privilege. In late medieval England wealth and ownership of land provided access to social prestige and political power; the family, especially the male line, was the means whereby these were passed on from one generation to the next. From the point of view of the lineage the son’s role was crucial because his marriage ensured its continuity; the marriage of the daughter who inherited took the property to another family. All this is the stuff of Middle English romance; many of its plots are derived from the crises and hiatuses of the nuclear family and the lineage, as I shall show.

A new consensus about the nature of Chaucer's initial readership in the 13 80s and 1390s seems to have emerged over the last decade or so. The old courtly audience of leisured aristocrats, male and female, that used to be extrapolated from the Troilus frontispiece has given way to another, composed of readers rather than listeners, gentry rather than nobility: busy administrators, soldiers, men of affairs. This new initial audience – the Chaucer circle, as it is now called – is predominantly, perhaps even exclusively, male. Moreover the most recent work by a historian on the household of Richard II emphasises its masculinity: we have been shown that it was composed almost entirely of men, that they ate their meals in shifts and slept at night wherever they could find floor-space. Even senior members of the household had to bed down on pallets in the passageways and vestibules. The whole place presumably smelt of horses, sweat and unwashed feet.

The Chaucer circle, most of whom worked in this unappetising ambience, are members of a civil service sub-culture: they are laymen who know French and Latin, they write as well as read (many are poets themselves), they are oriented towards the public world, they share a class outlook and, as readers of Chaucer, form a textual community. Nevertheless it would be a mistake, I think, to imagine that being members of that textual community was not complicated; Chaucer's open-ended poetry does not seem to be either the product or the source of an unproblematic relationship with any reader.