Writers of the Reign of Henry II: Twelve Essays
The significance of the twelfth century in European, and particularly British, history has long been recognized. Charles Homer Haskins wrote his Renaissance of the Twelfth Century in 1955; Christopher Brooke's Twelfth Century Renaissance and C. Warren Hollister's collection with the same title appeared almost simultaneously in 1969 and 1970; and by the end of the twentieth century there was a new overview, in R. N. Swanson's Twelfth Century Renaissance. The current essay collection is one of many that have followed in recent years, and so it might seem at first that the persistent references to neglect which characterize many of the essays in this volume are in some way misplaced. It is true that much has been written, in both large and small-scale studies, on this period, and it is one of the (minor) irritations of this volume that many of the writers fail to engage as fully as they might with some of that recent scholarship. However, it is also the case that persistent barriers remain when it comes to our ability to appreciate fully the scope and depth of the Angevin literary achievement. Each of the essays in this volume has something interesting to offer about some particular text or texts, but the true importance of the volume lies in its cumulative insistence on sweeping away some of those barriers.
The collection is bookended by statements which make clear what is at stake in a proper appreciation of the Angevin literary inheritance. Simon Meecham-Jones opens his Introduction by stating that the period fostered a range of literature "without precedent in English cultural history" (p. 2), while Rosalind Field concludes her essay by writing that "The literature of the reign of Henry II is seminal to the development of English fiction" (p. 260). Thus the literary productions in the period of Henry II (a somewhat elastic designation, as more than one of the contributors includes the decades before and/or after Henry's reign) are marked out as both remarkable and foundational. Other themes link the essays: most of the contributors take pains to insist on the multilingual context for the works discussed; many trace the significance of court culture and the role of courtier-clerics in Angevin political and literary life; and many essayists use close attention to particular material contexts to underpin their arguments. These leitmotifs help to bind the contributions together. As in any essay collection, some parts are more tightly knit to the whole than are others, but this stands as a particularly useful book, one of those rare collections in which the very good individual parts are enhanced by their proximity to the rest of the work.
Simon Meecham-Jones's Introduction hits the thematic notes that will be repeated throughout the collection. He points to the multilingual context of the [End Page 138] Angevin world, and notes the rather surprising fact that the authors we know choose one language to write in, even though they were likely to be bi- or multilingual. He notes that in Britain in the twelfth century, a linguistic choice was also an ideological one. As he deftly describes the essays to follow, he points to such persistent concerns as the confusion of identities, the articulation of ideas about nation and race, and the tensions and uncertainties that often ruled the lives of writers connected in some way to the life of court. It is important that he map out a broad and inclusive definition of what is meant by a writer of the period of Henry II, because the first essay in the volume, by John Gillingham, challenges the received wisdom about the culture of the court, or more precisely, about Henry's interest in the literature produced during his reign. Gillingham suggests that the king had no enthusiasm for historical writing, and argues that between 1154 and 1189 the most impressive works of Latin literature came from writers attached to courts other than Henry and Eleanor's. It might seem that the next essay, by Elisabeth van Houts, stands in direct opposition to Gillingham's, because it opens by remarking on the interest in the past in Normandy during the reign of Henry II, but while these writers might disagree about the degree of royal interest in the literary productions of the period, they are in accord in recognizing the importance of the works produced.
The first five essays are mainly focused on writing in Latin, though they differ in their assessment of it—for example, van Houts's assertion that Latin historical prose "was often a fairly dull affair" (p. 69) is followed immediately by Neil Cartlidge's marvellous essay on the letters of Peter of Blois. Cartlidge sees Peter's stylistic play as expressing various kinds of anxiety and alienation. Peter, he argues, is the product of, and an acute commentator on, a world which required constant self-fashioning; his linguistic play may signal what Meecham-Jones, in his essay on Walter of Châtillon, calls "a conscious gesture of affiliation" (p. 112) with other writers of the period. Like Cartlidge, Meecham-Jones explores the sense of alienation felt by Latin writers far removed from the tradition in which they choose to write. While Cartlidge's Peter refracts his anxieties through the multiple subjectivities of the letters and their debates, Meecham-Jones argues for an aggressive Walter, one who rips "bleeding chunks of classical texts" (p. 119) from their contexts and fashions them to his own uses. Part of this project has to do with issues of national identity. Meecham-Jones reads the lyric "Propter Sion non tacebo" as deeply engaged with questions of nation and place, and remarks on the failure of critics to note this aspect of the poem. The final entry in the Anglo-Latin section, Tony Davenport's entertaining account of Walter Map and Gerald of Wales's preoccupation with folk material, ghosts, and magic, also takes issue with critical commonplaces; in this case, the wish of critics to see the two (and perhaps Gerald in particular) as journalistic witnesses to the period. Like Cartlidge and Meecham-Jones, he points to the danger of failing to appreciate the depth of irony and play in Latin court writing.
For Meecham-Jones, modern readers may overlook questions of national identity as they surface in the writings of Walter and other Angevin writers, because of our own assessment of the nation-state as an idea born of the Renaissance. Mary Swan and Elaine Treharne, in a pair of essays on Old English in the period, similarly take issue with the labels and periodizations which lead us to separate English vernacular literary production into "Old" and "Early Middle" English. Both deal with particular manuscripts that show the coexistence of linguistic forms we are more comfortable separating; Swan explicitly makes the point that materialist philology, [End Page 139] with its insistence on considering whole objects, is helping to clarify the extent to which various forms of the language survived and cooperated. Swan's essay includes a useful list of manuscripts containing Old English texts produced between 1150 and 1200; she uses Lambeth Palace MS 487 as a test case. This collection of vernacular religious material may have been made by and/or for a parish priest or a secular Anglophone vowess. Elaine Treharne's study of an item in London, British Library, Cotton Vespasian D.xiv, an English translation of Ralph D'Escures's homily on the Festival of the Virgin Mary, makes a similar point about the vitality and importance of English as a language of religious instruction and discussion in the period. She points to subtle alterations to D'Escures's Latin which serve to update the homily and suit it to a learned audience which was interested in contemporary theological debate.
The last entry in the English section of the collection is Elizabeth Solopova's on the English poetry of the period. The bulk of the essay considers Lay amon and his use of alliteration; Solopova concludes by noting that early Middle English poets no longer had an "absolute language" (p. 197) integrated with traditional form and subject matter, reminding us again of both the uncertainties and opportunities facing the writers of the period, whatever their language.
And another of those languages was, of course, French. The essays by Françoise Le Saux, Laura Ashe, and Rosalind Field all deal with Anglo Norman texts; there is also a brief essay by Judith Weiss in this section, concentrating on Arthur and ambivalence towards the imperial motif—as this piece focuses mostly on Geoffrey of Monmouth, I am not sure about its placement here. Le Saux opens with reference to the idea of cultural hybridity, and reads some of Marie's fables in terms of political problems such as identifying one's true overlord—a problem that was surely resonant in Henry's day. A reading of Bisclavret which looks, in part, at the tale through the lens of male military brotherhood follows. Laura Ashe argues that Thomas of Britain's Tristan, in its refusal to allow the story of Tristan to acquire any symbolic meaning, is one of the few pure tragedies of the Middle Ages, almost modern in its psychological depth. Weiss's piece on Arthur and emperors follows, tracing the ambivalence towards empire suggested in Arthur's biography and in other texts of the period. Finally, Rosalind Field moves away from the court of Henry and Eleanor, pointing out that most of the Anglo-Norman romances of the period reflect baronial concerns. The point has been made before, but I do not think anyone has noted so neatly as Field the congruence between tale and history in the period: "The events of the mid-twelfth century in England are resonant with traditional tale patterns" (p. 256), she writes. In other words, the Henrys, Eleanor, Matilda, Stephen, and the rest were in some ways living stories, and the encounters with, and reflections on, these lives and legacies helped to produce what Field calls the "literature of a generation" (p. 256): the literature of the reign of Henry II. [End Page 140]
