For modern readers, making sense of a literary text from medieval England, whether originally written in Latin, Anglo-Norman or one of the dialects of Middle English, necessarily involves a self-conscious effort of historical understanding. When, at the end of the B-text of Langland’s Piers Plowman (probably dating from before 1380), a friar named ‘Sire Penetrans Domos’ (i. e., he who enters houses) appears as an ally of the Antichrist (B. XX:341), many modern readers of the text are quite likely to be uncertain of the exact status of a friar as opposed to, say, a monk. They are even less likely to be aware of Langland’s allusion to the forerunners of the Antichrist mentioned in 2 Timothy 3.6 whom St Paul prophesied would ‘creep into houses’ in the Last Days, or of thirteenth - and fourteenth-century debates about the legitimacy of the mendicant orders in which the friars’ opponents marshalled such biblical texts in order to attack them as ‘ antichristi’. The task of any historically based literary criticism is thus to provide modern readers of medieval literature with some plausible context (social, political, religious, intellectual or intertextual) which allows them to grasp the contemporary significance of any particular work.
Yet, disappointingly, attempts by historians to contextualize medieval works of imaginative literature (defined here as works of verse, drama or narrative fiction) have often taken the form of a search for allusions to real-life people and places within literary texts, as in the quest for an historical model from the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries for the outlaw-hero of the Gest of Robyn Hode (early fifteenth century). Of course, realistic details do frequently occur in fictional texts: Robin Hood’s main enemy in the Gest (apart from the sheriff of Nottingham) is the abbot of the real-life monastic house of St Mary’s, York. Nevertheless, when works of fiction involve external reference to actual historical people, these characters are never just passive reflections of social reality. Rather, they are active interpretations of reality which express, through the use of social stereotypes and stock literary conventions, some particular ideological viewpoint. Hence the proud, grasping abbot of St Mary’s in the Gest is not simply an individual who happens to be corrupt. More significantly, he embodies the avarice and pride for which the prelates of the medieval church were regularly denounced in contemporary estates satires such as John Gower’s Vox Cla-mantis (c.1381) (III, 1:10-20). Indeed, even the actions and behaviour of Robin himself, as revealed by the Gest, conform closely to the stereotype familiar from other medieval outlaw-tales.
If literary texts are of significance to the medieval historian, it is not, therefore, because they ‘mirror’ historical fact. We should not, for instance, suppose that Lang-land’s ‘Sire Penetrans Domos’ provides evidence for the corruption of the mendicant orders by the late fourteenth century. On the contrary, the accusation that the friars were illegitimate penetrantes domos was one which, by this date, had been made against them for almost a century and a half. Rather, medieval literature is of historical interest because literary texts were themselves partisan interventions in the ideological conflicts of the day. Medieval writers thus often addressed in verse the kinds of issues which we today would deal with in prose form, as when a thirteenth-century canon of Leicester abbey turned to poetry to celebrate the defeat of an attempt by the abbey’s villeins to assert their freedom in the royal court.1 Much of this verse was occasioned by immediate political events at home or abroad. The focus of this chapter, however, is on the more general ideas about the social order to be found within medieval imaginative literature and on the sources of these ideas in the work of contemporary philosophers, theologians and preachers.
If the attempts of historians to make sense of medieval literature have often been hindered by a tendency to search for allusions to real-life people and places, we might expect the social ideology of medieval texts to be better explicated in the work of modern literary critics. Certainly, much recent critical theory, most notably that associated with feminism and new historicism, has provided a welcome emphasis on the need to see literary texts as engagements with the concerns of specific societies at particular times rather than as instances of some timeless canon of ‘Great Literature’ which speaks to us across the ages about the ‘human condition’. It is this historically specific approach, in which literary texts are understood as ‘strategic interventions’ in which contemporary power relations of estate, class and gender are ‘negotiated, reinforced and challenged’,2 that has been adopted here. Yet, in general, modern literary critics have tended to stress the ‘challenge’ mounted by works of medieval literature in their negotiation with the dominant forms of authority and inequality of the day rather than emphasizing their role in ‘reinforcing’ the contemporary social hierarchy. As a result, literature comes to be seen as providing a ‘sanctioned space for the expression of social dissidence’,3 as when Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (c.1388-1400) is interpreted as a sceptical subversion of the traditional medieval ideology that presented the social orders as bound together by ties of mutual harmony and ‘common profit’, or when his ‘Miller’s Tale’ is seen as an ‘improbable victory’ over the forces of social and ideological hegemony.4 By contrast, it will be argued here that, far from mounting a challenge to the official ideology of the day, the literary texts that survive from medieval England are, overwhelmingly, partisan expressions of that very ideology. Such works were intended not to subvert but rather to perpetuate the existing social order and were thus hostile to those members of society whose actions threatened the status quo.
How then were contemporary social inequalities between classes and orders described and justified by medieval philosophers, theologians and preachers, and how were such ideas put to work in literary texts? To what extent did a reliance on Christian teachings create tensions within medieval social theory, and how did medieval authors attempt to resolve such tensions? If most medieval literature was intended to reinforce the status quo, to what extent can we identify a challenge to the official ideology of the day within medieval English literature? How did medieval writers make sense of the inequalities between men and women which were one of the most fundamental aspects of medieval English social structure?
World History
