Rewriting English Literary History 1042–1215

Abstract

Abstract The last 10 years have seen a swathe of revisionary scholarship on the afterlife of Old English texts in the 12th century. This article places this research beside work on the earliest Middle English texts and contemporary writing in Latin and French to suggest that the time is now ripe for a new, synthetic literary history of the period. In particular, the article identifies three key aspects of post‐Conquest literary culture which have been neglected because they chafe against the conventional paradigms of literary history, with its expectation of a literature national, monolingual and constantly original. The 12th‐century norms, by contrast, were regionalism, multilingualism, and the habitual recycling of older texts. Medievalists must insist these differences should inform wider discussions about the form and purpose of literary history in the 21st century.

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