Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

To survey English poetry from its inception in the Anglo-Saxon period through to the fifteenth century is a large aim, and perhaps a surprising one. It is all too common for English ‘medieval’ writing to be divided firmly into Old English and Middle English, pre- and post-Conquest writing. There are, as this volume shows, many good reasons for such a division: cultural, linguistic and literary. Yet there are also continuities of more and less certain kinds, and a particular aim of this book is to draw attention to such continuities. One of these is the power, flexibility and enduring quality of poetry itself. As the primary literary form in both the Anglo-Saxon and the later medieval period, poetry is a rich and important subject, and one that needs introduction in a world where poetry is too little read. Medieval poetry spanned an enormous range of literary genres from lyric to drama, and whereas we have come to see the novel as the dominant narrative form, in the medieval period narrative too took the form of poetry. To privilege poetry may seem to be to swim against the tide. The recent drift of medieval studies has been towards the placing of medieval literature within its cultural and literary contexts. Rather than being dominated by Chaucer, Gower and Langland, the ‘new map’ of medieval literature, as Peter Brown terms it (2007: 3), looks quite different. It emphasises the ... log in or subscribe to read full text