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.Similarly, the treatises of the fifteenth-centurylawyer Sir John Fortescue, De Laudibus Legum Angliae and On the Governance of England, were still being copied in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as living guides to English law and government.So,too, the courtly lyric poetry of Chaucer and his successors continued tobe used for song and ‘dalliance’ in the earlier Tudor court—a continuitywhich Puttenham recognizes when he speaks of the ‘new company ofcourtly makers’ in the time of Henry VIII as successors to Chaucer andGower.Sooner or later, however, these continuities were bound to bebroken.New religious beliefs, new kinds of drama, new court fashions,as well as changes in the language, would progressively deprive MiddleEnglish texts of their original functions, and leave them to survive either as works of literature or as objects of antiquarian study.Antiquarianism is, generally speaking, conspicuous by its absence inthe Middle English period.The world ‘old’ itself, so often honorificin Anglo-Saxon, tends to depreciation in Middle English—Sir Gawain,expecting a smart Green Chapel, finds ‘nobot an olde cave’—and thereis little sign that old vernacular texts, any more than old buildings,were valued for their antiquity.According to the poet himself, RichardII asked Gower ‘That to his hihe worthinesse | Som newe thing Ischolde boke’ ( Confessio Amantis Prologue 50∗–51∗); and Chaucer, in the prologue to his Sir Thopas, apologizes because it is old: ‘a rym I lerned longe agoon’ ( Canterbury Tales VII 709).As the ‘newe thinges’ of Chaucer and Gower themselves grew old, however, they were to dependlargely for their survival upon an antiquarianism quite alien to theirauthors.Antiquarian interest in old vernacular writings hardly emergesbefore Tudor times; and it is closely associated from the first withanother sentiment of which there is relatively little trace in medievalwriters: the sense of England.The Middle English Song of Agincourtexpresses nationalistic hostility towards the French and patriotic pridein the English; but England as a place, with its own traditions linked toThe afterlife of Middle English literature129its own towns and rivers and seas, played rather little part in MiddleEnglish literature.It was the Tudor antiquarians and topographerssuch as John Leland, John Bale, and John Stow who first combined aninterest in England with an interest in her old writers.Stow’s two mainworks represent a typical combination of topographical and philologicallearning: an edition of Chaucer (1561) and a Survey of London (1598).The same interest in England and her past which inspired men likeStow to collect and preserve old manuscripts led less learned menalso to conceive for the first time of ‘English literature’.Puttenham’sdiscussion of ‘the most commended writers in our English poesy’ maynowadays appear a not very sophisticated piece of literary history; but it displays a historical sense of continuity in English writings for which it would be hard to find a parallel in the Middle Ages.Whereas Dunbar’sfamous list of dead poets in the Lament for the Makaris, being concerned with the ahistorical fact of death, departs from chronological order anddisplays little sense of literary tradition, Puttenham traces the main line of English poetry from Chaucer and Gower to Wyatt and Surrey andbeyond in a truly historical fashion, relating the laureate successionof poets to the better known chronology of monarchs: ‘In the latterend of the same king’s reign sprang up a new company of courtlymakers.’.We see here the beginnings of a canonical history, and ahistorical canon, of English Literature with which we are still familiar: John Stevens, in his Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court, gives essentially the same account of the relation between Wyatt and Chauceras does Puttenham.One may say, then, that English Literature is in one sense a creationof the Tudor age, and that certain Middle English writers were incorpo-rated into its canon and history posthumously.This chapter will returnlater to that process of incorporation; but first I want to explore further the reasons why the notion of English Literature developed when itdid, and the implications of that development for the understanding ofearlier writings.The historian G.R.Elton has said that the most notable thing aboutTudor polity was ‘the emergence of a unitary and dynamic politicalstructure involving rulers and ruled’; and it may well be that theemergence of a unitary and dynamic national literature was an almostinevitable concomitant of that development towards political unityunder Henry VII and his successors.Thus a literary historian, JamesSimpson, has observed: ‘It is precisely as the newly unified Church andState of the 1540s repels the recent past that English literary historybegins.For the first stocktaking of British writers derives from theseevents.’4 There is, however, another factor of more particular relevance130The afterlife of Middle English literatureto literature, and that is the coming of the printing press.The firstbook to be printed in English was William Caxton’s History of Troy, in 1473 or 1474; and this date has perhaps a better claim than any otherto mark the beginning of the unitary and dynamic literary tradition.In some ways, as an earlier chapter suggested, the new technology ofprint made less immediate difference than might be supposed.Thehabit of reading poetry and prose, as well as listening to them, hadalready spread widely through English society in the last centuries ofthe manuscript era; and the coming of print may be said to have doneno more, in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, than accelerate thatprocess.By producing more copies of texts more uniformly, however,the early printers greatly improved the chances that a given work wouldbe read by contemporaries in different parts of England, and also thatit would be preserved for posterity and consulted by later readers.Itbecame less likely that a work would either pass unnoticed at the time of its composition or else fall into oblivion shortly thereafter, as happened to so many works in the age of manuscript.Sixteenth-century readerswere in a much better position than their medieval predecessors toknow both what their own contemporaries were writing and also whathad been written in the past.What readers did not know was more andmore what they did not want to know, not what they had simply lost ormissed.A canon was in process of formation.In the Middle Ages, the only literary canon known to readers wasthat of the Latin and (by repute) the Greek classics, a canon definedand transmitted by the schools.5 If a vernacular writer imagined himself canonized—and few did—he could think only of joining the augustcompany of Classical writers.In the Inferno, Dante is received as a brother poet by Homer, Horace, Ovid, Lucan, and Virgil:They took me as a member of their company,So that I was a sixth among those great intellects.( Inferno IV 101–2)In a similar fashion, but much more modestly, Chaucer tells his Troilus tokis the steppes, where as thow seest paceVirgile, Ovide, Omer, Lucan, and Stace.(V 1791–2)In the vernaculars, French, Italian, or English, there was no such canon.Chaucer had surely read more English poetry than used to be supposed;but his knowledge of both predecessors and contemporaries must haveThe afterlife of Middle English literature131been extremely patchy.It was, in fact, impossible for any medievalwriter to take a synoptic view of his own literature
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