The Making of Middle English, 1765-1910. - Review - book review

Criticism, Wntr, 2000 by Julie Towell

The Making of Middle English, 1765-1910 by David Matthews. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Pp. xxxvii 231. $39.95.

It is common for scholars in all fields to posit varying degrees of progress toward greater rigor and sophistication in their disciplines as the years pass. Critiquing this proclivity in The Study of Language in England, 1780-1860 (1983) Hans Aarsleff warns, "it is not the forward march that misleads but rather the conviction that the top has been reached.... In this view all earlier study of language is seen as a rather malicious conspiracy against the future and the present enlightenment, and history gains attention only as a sort of inverted self-flattery" (9). In a perfect example of such "self-flattery," Norman Cantor, in Inventing the Middle Ages (1991), argues that "medieval studies were very largely a twentieth-century phenomenon" (28). He dismisses the work of earlier medievalists by commenting: "the romantics lacked the scholarship, the learning and instruments of research, to go beyond the most superficial kind of inquiry into the medieval past" (29). Similarly, he depreciates the historians of the later nineteenth century when he contends, "Victorian culture made its contribution to discovery of the medieval world by the founding of research institutes, by the building up of libraries and the organization of archives, and by the publication of medieval records. This was important work, but it was preliminary to actual historical reconstruction of the Middle Ages. It was not the creative work of perception, imagination, and narrative itself" (28). Cantor's assessment is, of course, not unique; in a tradition of such "self-flattery," after all, the scholars he belittles had belittled their predecessors as well.

Despite this widespread tendency to dismiss earlier scholarship and scholars within the discipline of Middle English (and of Old English), there are scholars exploring the work of their predecessors for, at the very least, the following reasons: (1) to determine and evaluate the achievements as well as the "failures" of these predecessors, (2) to isolate and analyze the ideologies functioning in their scholarship, (3) to interrogate the motives and influences acting upon the production of early English literary texts, and (4) to recognize the extent of the influence of their preferences and appraisals upon our own understanding of the field. In The Making of Middle English (volume 18 of the series Medieval Cultures) David Matthews argues, "our reality must not be allowed to efface the importance of prior realities" (xvii). The commonly held view that the work of earlier scholars of Middle English should be dismissed as wrongheaded has meant, among other things, that "the long, often rich history of textual transmission since the invention of print is increasingly neglected" (xv). Matthews's examination of earlier scholarship offers a compelling account of the time, milieu, and motives of those scholars.

It may seem remarkable to situate the origin of modern Middle English scholarship with Thomas Percy, a man who characterizes early English poems as "rude Songs of ancient Minstrels and barbarous productions of unpolished ages" and "not as labours of art, but as effusions of nature" (Reliques of Ancient English Poetry 1:v). Despite this harsh assessment, however, the publication of Percy's popular and influential Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765 is a suitable starting point for David Matthews's informative and highly readable overview of the course of Middle English studies from antiquarian beginnings to establishment as an academic discipline. In selecting his endpoint, Matthews has chosen the year of Frederick Furnivall's death, 1910, thus symbolically acknowledging the considerable impact that the founder of the Early English Text Society (EETS) had upon the production of Middle English texts. Matthews contextualizes his material by depicting several seminal figures in the history of Middle English scholarship. Matthews bases his text upon an examination of these major "authorities." He examines:

   both the materiality of the books produced in the period and the impact of
   the lives and approaches of the scholars who produced them.... This entails
   looking not simply (or even principally) at the actual medieval text as it
   has been edited from the manuscript, but at everything that surrounds that
   text: the scholarship--in introduction, notes, apparatus, glossary--along
   with anything else that might have made its way into the text, such as
   promotional material, lists of subscribers, owner's annotations, and the
   like. (xvii)

Thus, in addition to the biographical, social, cultural, and political backgrounds of his subject(s), Matthews scrutinizes the editorial positionings, methodologies, and manipulations of these men in their production of Middle English texts. He argues, "it is in such microhistories--of the text in the manuscript, the text in its editions, the circulation of the text, the transmission of editions, the social and scholarly placement of editors--that a larger history of the study of Middle English, such as I aim to trace here, can be found" (xv). Matthews's aim is a "material history" (xvii) of the field and a Foucauldian "genealogy of the subject" (192). He acknowledges the work of Chris Baldick, Terry Eagleton, Allen Frantzen, Lee Patterson, and Theresa Coletti who, "in different ways, [have] argued for the importance of a deliberate remembering of English studies' ideological past" (xxi-xxii). To Matthews the "narrative of Middle English ... shift[s] from the deployment of Middle English studies as an essentially privatized means of aesthetic self-transformation to its reformulation as an arm of governmentally sanctioned education" (xxiv). Based upon this assessment, Matthews has divided his text into two parts, each representative of the prevailing motives (personal and political) evinced by the presenters of Middle English literary works during the period.