Difficult pasts: Post-Reformation memory and the medieval romance

By Mimi Ensley

Medieval romances were widely condemned by early modern thinkers: the genre of questing knights and marvellous adventure was decried as bloody, bawdy and superstitious. Despite such proclamations, though, the Middle English romance genre remained popular across the early modern period.
Difficult pasts examines the reception of Middle English romances after the Protestant Reformation in England, arguing that the genre’s popularity rested not in its violent or superstitious qualities, but in its multivocality. Incorporating insights from book history, reception history and cultural memory studies, Ensley argues that the medieval romance book became a flexible site of memory with which early modern readers could both connect with and distance themselves from the recent ‘difficult past’, a past that invited controversy and encouraged divided perspectives. Central characters in this study range from canonical authors like Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser to less studied figures, such as printer William Copland, Elizabethan scribe Edward Banister and seventeenth-century poet and romance enthusiast, John Lane. In uniting a wide range of romance readers’ perspectives, the book complicates clear ruptures between manuscript and print, Catholic and Protestant, or medieval and Renaissance. Difficult pasts reveals how the romance book offers a new way to understand the simultaneous change and continuity that defines post-Reformation England.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Feb 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9781526157881

Book preview

Introduction: Palimpsests – Reformation, romance and erasure

Edward Dering (c.1540–76) defined the recent past with reference to its literature and its religion. English ‘forefathers’, Dering writes in his Briefe and Necessarie Catechism (1575), read such medieval romances as Bevis of Hampton and ‘Arthur of the round table’ alongside ‘their Legendawry’ and ‘their Saintes liues’. And Dering is not pleased by the combination. For him, romances and hagiographies were texts ‘whych Satan had made, hell had printed and were warranted vnto seale vnder the Popes priuiledge, to kindle in mens hartes the sparkes of superstytyon’.¹ These texts were symbolic reminders of the ‘superstytyon’ of the recent, pre-Reformation past. Roger Ascham (1515–68), humanist tutor to Queen Elizabeth, made similar claims about the ‘popish’ nature of medieval romance. For Ascham, romances were popular ‘in our forefathers tyme’, and they ‘were made in Monasteries, by idle Monkes, or wanton Chanons’.² They promoted violence and adultery – ‘open mans slaughter, and bold bawdrye’ – and if people continue to read them, Ascham claims, ‘they will soone displace all bookes of godly learnyng’.³ Romances were the products of a ‘wanton’ past, one that existed in living memory but which writers like Dering and Ascham seemingly hoped to forget.

Difficult pasts: Post-Reformation memory and the medieval romance is about how readers like Dering and Ascham came to define – and possibly to forget, but more often to rewrite – their relationships with their ‘forefathers’, their recent pasts. It’s a book about cultural memory, periodisation and historiography. And it takes the medieval romance genre, books like Bevis of Hampton and ‘Arthur of the round table’, as its focal point. Interrogating the shift from ‘medieval’ to Renaissance, Reformed, or early modern England is well-trodden ground, and scholars’ perceptions of this shift take on different contours depending on the viewer’s perspective.⁴ Was the shift primarily dynastic, occurring with the death of Richard III? Was it intellectual, following the influences of continental humanist thought? Or was it technological, dependant on the invention of the printing press? Of course, all of these moments are pivotal, and none on its own tells the full story. Despite their differences, however, all of these theories work from a common premise: it is easier – from our present-day perspective – to notice dramatic change, rather than subtle continuity.

This book does not seek to define yet another moment when the Middle Ages became something else. Nor does it seek to deny the shifts (technological, dynastic, religious or intellectual) that others have pinpointed. It does, however, seek to add to the story of periodisation and historical change as told from a literary perspective by paying attention to moments of subtle continuity rather than large-scale change. James Simpson’s Reform and Cultural Revolution marks an important moment in understanding the creation of the ‘Middle Ages’ in literary history. Simpson suggests that sixteenth-century writers frequently saw themselves, and their society, as existing on the ‘positive side of a massive historical divide’ across which they could look ‘back to the relatively recent past as if to a distant epoch’.⁵ In other words, with the Protestant Reformation came a need to renegotiate the place of medieval, Catholic authors in English literary history. Those poets who could be co-opted into the new Protestant historiography – poets like Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland – became part of a new narrative, one in which England had always been Protestant, had always been fighting against the influence of Rome. Those who could not fit neatly into this Protestant literary history, the story goes, fell by the wayside, erased from popular memory.

However, among all of this erasure, the medieval romance genre remained. Medieval romances were present across the religio-political changes of the Reformation, remaining in print after Henry VIII’s 1534 Act of Supremacy broke English ties with the Catholic church; across the reinstatement of Catholicism with the reign of Mary I (1553–58); and through Elizabeth I’s (1558–1603) revival of monarchically supported Protestantism. Across these decades of religio-political change, the romance genre was read in manuscript and print, by Protestants and Catholics alike. Moreover, Middle English romances were printed across the Reformation largely without the signs of Protestant censorship, updating or rewriting we see in the other medieval genres read, edited and printed in the early modern period.

Noting the genre’s longevity in the early modern period, Simpson describes romance as an ‘unkillable’ form. The romance ‘survived’ the Reformation break, appealing to both high- and lowbrow audiences alike across dramatically changing times.⁶ Simpson’s ‘unkillable romance’ designation tells a story of survival in the face of erasure; the romance is ‘unkillable’, suggesting that it ought to have been killed or that large numbers of people attempted to kill it. This narrative, thus, privileges the act of destruction. The romance becomes a zombie-like anomaly, an exception to the rule of the post-Reformation separation from the newly defined ‘Middle Ages’. The genre, in this account, becomes a palimpsest, the result of a failed attempt at erasure. Indeed, Tiffany Jo Werth begins her study of post-Reformation romance with the metaphor of the palimpsest, noting that ‘the palimpsestic remnants of England’s religious past dot story as well as history’.⁷ The palimpsest becomes a useful metaphor for conceptualising the temporal complexities involved when early modern authors negotiate their connections to and distance from a contentious history.

Still, the palimpsest, at its core, is a metaphor that centres erasure – failed erasure, but erasure, nonetheless. Difficult pasts, by contrast, asks whether erasure must serve as our primary lens for understanding medieval ‘survivals’ after the Reformation. What might happen if continuity or stability, rather than division or erasure, became our focus? And if the idea of the erasure or palimpsesting proves limiting, what other material or codicological metaphors might help us reframe the grand narratives of literary history in order to deal with the complexities of what scholars of cultural memory call ‘difficult pasts’? If the palimpsest is no longer the central metaphor, if erasure is no longer the starting point, other possible material metaphors emerge and can create new frameworks for conceptualising the transition from medieval to Renaissance in literary history. Difficult pasts, then, focuses on other sites of material memory – the catalogue, the collage, the monument, and the museum – in order to articulate both change and continuity across the early modern period and to offer an alternative to a view centred on the idea of the new superseding the old.

Chapter 1, ‘Catalogues’, examines the material ways in which romances were preserved and categorised – rather than erased – by early modern readers. The chapter begins with those Protestant polemicists like Dering and Ascham who crafted lists of romance texts to warn readers about the dangers of the genre. In doing so, however, such polemicists created what Werth calls an index, or what Trevor Ross terms a ‘negative form of canon-making’.⁸ These book lists effectively define a genre. I argue that these catalogues expand the early modern conception of the medieval romance genre by including new forms, such as the continental prose romances gaining popularity in the sixteenth century, along with lighter, comical ‘jests’. This chapter also shows that the catalogues defined in early modern romance lists reflect material, paratextual decisions made by William Copland, the primary printer of medieval English romance in the late sixteenth century. Despite the consistency of the titles included in such catalogues, however, the case studies that conclude this chapter – the romance collection detailed in Robert Langham’s letter describing the 1575 festivities at Kenilworth and an antiquarian Sammelband now housed in the Bodleian Library – demonstrate that early modern romance catalogues were used to characterise and serve very different types of readers.

While Chapter 1 focuses on the printers of romance and the readers of romances in print, Chapter 2, ‘Collage’, examines a particular early modern creator of a romance manuscript: Edward Banister, an Elizabethan scribe and recusant Catholic who used printed books as the exemplars for his early modern manuscripts of Middle English romance. Banister’s manuscripts, which include copies of Sir Degore, Sir Eglamour, Sir Isumbras, The Jest of Sir Gawain and Robert the Devil, have received little critical attention, and since the identification of the scribe in 1978, questions about how Banister’s biography and Catholic identity relate to his romance manuscripts have yet to be asked. This chapter, thus, interrogates the connections between the scribe’s recusant identity and his interest in the romance genre and manuscript medium. The metaphor of the ‘collage’ allows us to more fully comprehend the interplay of time and technology, creation and destruction in Banister’s story and manuscripts. We see technological collage in the ways Banister combines the aesthetics of print and manuscript, and we see cultural collage when we consider Banister’s position as a practicing Catholic in the midst of a changing religious world.

Chapter 3 takes on the metaphor of the ‘monument’ and turns from anonymous romance texts to those composed by named authors, in particular by Geoffrey Chaucer. As a metaphor, the ‘monument’ highlights curated longevity as resistance to erasure. Monuments are crafted in the present to ensure the long-term memory of a particular version of the past. Thus, when he invokes Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale in Book IV of his Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser defines Chaucer’s work as a ‘monument’, lamenting that ‘wicked Time … That famous moniment hath quite defaste’.⁹ The idea of the monument, then, is bound up with the idea of the ruin; Spenser presents Chaucer as a monumental ruin, one upon which he can build for future audiences. Importantly, he does not seek to erase Chaucer, but to highlight the incompleteness of his works. This chapter compares Spenser’s treatment of the Squire’s Tale with a less well-known seventeenth-century Squire’s Tale composed by poet John Lane, who, like Spenser, uses the romance genre to build upon the ‘ruin’ of the past.¹⁰ Exploring both of these authors through the framework of the ‘monument’ reveals their varied approaches to the place of the ‘father of English poetry’ in literary history. Both authors use Chaucer’s romance as a monumental foundation upon which they might define themselves, Spenser as a kindred spirit, a poet, and Lane as an antiquarian scholar interested in restoring what time has ‘defaste’.

If monuments are curated versions of the past, the same is true of museums. Thus, Chapter 4 explores the ‘museum’ metaphor alongside one of the most popular Middle English romances to persist across the Reformation divide: Guy of Warwick. It compares the presentation of Guy’s artefacts in John Lydgate’s Guy of Warwick with Samuel Rowlands’s 1609 Famous History of Guy, Earl of Warwick. Both Lydgate’s and Rowlands’s Guy narratives present textual representations of artefacts associated with Guy’s romance. Objects featured in the narrative – like Guy’s sword, the axe of the giant Colbrond and the rib of the Dun Cow that Guy was supposed to have killed in Coventry – become central to the longevity of Guy’s romance and to some authors’ conceptions of the material pre-conquest past. While Lydgate’s narrative positions these objects as relics, signalling the triumphs of Christianity over time, Rowlands’s text ‘musealises’ the artefacts, making them portals to and preservers of the distant, tenth-century past. Guy’s objects, in Rowlands’s text, become tourist sites and museum pieces. In both Lydgate’s text and Rowlands’s, though, the artefacts feed off the narratives that describe them: books become virtual museums or virtual reliquaries.

Finally, I conclude with a summary of what has been learned in this book by focusing on a final case study of the 1517 copy of Robert the Devil housed in the British Library. I then return to the idea of the palimpsest, assessing what has been gained through my attempt to find literary historical narratives that do not rely on erasure. In her work on the figurative use of the term ‘palimpsest’, Sarah Dillon distinguishes between the adjectives ‘palimpsestic’ and ‘palimpsestuous’.¹¹ If ‘palimpsestic’ refers to the process of erasure, Dillon writes, ‘palimpsestuous describes the structure that one is presented with as a result of that process’.¹² Overall, then, Difficult pasts suggests ‘palimpsestuous’ codicological metaphors for describing the place of the medieval within the post-Reformation world. It urges us to move beyond a sense of iconoclastic erasure to consider what remained after the events of the Protestant Reformation in England. And it argues that books – and in particular romance books – continue to provide a special material site at which to explore notions of historiographic presence, distance, continuity and change over time.

Difficult pasts, thus, simultaneously recognises the sociocultural changes that accompanied and precipitated the Reformation, changes that undeniably included acts of destruction and erasure, while also bearing in mind that these changes were not uniform, that erasures were not always complete or even always experienced as erasure. Throughout the book, I question Simpson’s ‘unkillable’ designation and the palimpsest it suggests to consider those romance readers who did not see erasure as a desirable goal. And I demonstrate that while some Reformers – like those featured at the beginning of this chapter – did seek to erase romance memory in the pursuit of historical truth, others in the early modern era reimagined romance narratives to suit a new post-Reformation idea of English history. The medieval romance, we will see, transformed with the needs of its readers, and by looking at the activities of these varied readers, we move beyond palimpsestic erasure to find other ways of understanding both continuity and change. Before pursuing these new metaphors further, in what remains of this introductory chapter, I introduce readers to the hard-to-define category of medieval romance, and I explore the various threads of this book’s methodology – its interest in periodisation, memory studies and materiality – in more detail.

What is romance?

In part, Simpson’s understanding of the place of medieval romance in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries relies on his narrow definition of ‘medieval romance’. For Simpson, ‘romance’ includes those texts that ‘conform to a very specific tripartite narrative pattern’, one in which ‘a state of actual or implied integration gives way to a state of disintegration, submission to the tests of which is the premiss of return to a state of integration’.¹³ In other words, for Simpson, romances must have a comic structure that ends happily. And he notes that while scholars often count just under ninety ‘medieval romances’, his criteria reduce that total by about half.¹⁴ Such an understanding of the genre, however, assumes a static category, one that emerged in the Middle Ages and did not change over time. Imagining readers who have changed with the times still returning to this stable, ‘unkillable’ relic of the past invites us to privilege the erasure that should have occurred, rather than ask how the genre and its readers accommodated temporal change.

Simpson claims that his understanding of the category amends modern definitional schemes that have been too reliant on past readers’ conceptions of the genre. He contends that early modern readers of romance have distorted modern perspectives, with ‘sixteenth-century anti-chivalric humanism and the medieval revival begun by pro-chivalric eighteenth-century antiquarians … blurring our understanding’ of the form.¹⁵ But while Simpson seeks to move beyond ‘sixteenth-century anti-chivalric’ conceptions of the genre to delink modern understandings of the form from this early modern lens, I am more interested in exploring the contours of that early modern lens. This is not to say that I am aligning my conception of the genre with the narrow lens of early modern polemic; instead, I am moving beyond the ‘sixteenth-century anti-chivalric’ narrative to better comprehend other early modern understandings of the genre. Difficult pasts, thus, is not interested in ‘romance’ as a category per se; rather, it is concerned with the post-Reformation understanding of that category.

In taking this perspective, Difficult pasts aligns with recent re-evaluations of the romance genre that understand its fluidity, complexity and ability to change over time as one of its defining features. The category of ‘romance’, as it is understood today, includes stories of knights on adventure familiar from Thomas Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, but it also may include stories recounting the exploits of historical figures like Richard I and Charlemagne or historical events like the siege of Jerusalem or the fall of Troy. Some romance narratives are less about history than they are about magical encounters with fairy queens or monstrous giants; others focus on a hero’s quest to attain his rightful title. Some are homiletic, some are violent, and many are a combination of the two. The University of York’s Database of Middle English Romance categorises its corpus of romance titles through such varied motifs as the accused queen, cannibalism, crusades, exile, heraldry, marriage, military combat, otherworlds, penance, the supernatural, tournaments, quests, rape, travel and many other themes.¹⁶ With such diversity in mind, it is easy to see why Yin Liu argues that the scholar attempting to define ‘medieval romance’ mirrors the ‘adventures of the knight himself, as he overcomes formidable opponents, negotiates unexpected setbacks, [and] puzzles out marvels beyond the scope of his prior experience’.¹⁷

Certainly, some modern scholars have taken up the definitional challenge of the ‘romance’ genre, and, like Simpson, have sought narrow definitional criteria. K.S. Whetter argues for four essential characteristics in medieval romances: ‘the role and prominence of ladies; the role and prominence of love; … the role and prominence of adventure’ and the text’s culmination in a happy ending.¹⁸ John Finlayson’s definition is narrower. Finlayson characterises the genre as one in which adventure is central and ‘a knight achieves great feats of arms … in a series of adventures which have no social, political, or religious motivation and little or no connection with medieval actuality’.¹⁹ Further complicating the project of definition are the various romance subgenres suggested across the scholarship. In romance research, romance stories classically are divided into three ‘matters’: the ‘matter of Rome’ – romances about the siege of Thebes, the Fall of Troy or Alexander the Great; the ‘matter of Britain’ – tales of King Arthur, Merlin and the knights of the round table; and the ‘matter of France’ – featuring such figures as Charlemagne and Roland. These ‘matters’ are more suited to continental examples, but in England we do find texts from these classical ‘matters’ alongside a group known as the ‘matter of England’, stories of English heroes like Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hampton and Havelock the Dane.²⁰ Other subdivisions are possible, though. Dieter Mehl, for instance, classifies romances by length, including ‘shorter romances’, ‘longer romances’ and ‘novels in verse’, but he also separates out the ‘homiletic romances’, those with a clear moral or didactic tone that often share narrative material with saints’ legends.²¹ The TEAMS Middle English Text Series offers volumes based on ‘romances of England’, ‘Breton Lays’, romances about Gawain, romances about Charlemagne and ‘Sentimental and Humorous Romances’.²²

But rather than relying on strict definitional schemes, it is becoming more common to recognise the romance genre’s flexibility, complexity and fuzziness as a feature of the genre itself. As Corinne Saunders writes, the romance ‘is a genre of extraordinary fluidity’; Raluca Radulescu calls it ‘chameleonic’, ‘always on the verge of becoming something else, or taking on the resemblance of neighbouring narratives’.²³ To deal with this ‘fluidity’, Ad Putter, Jane Gilbert and Helen Cooper all have advocated for an understanding of the category based on Wittgenstein’s concept of ‘family resemblance’.²⁴ As Putter and Gilbert put it in their introduction to The Spirit of Medieval English Popular Romance, ‘we should think of [the romances] as forming a complex network of relationships and similarities, not as a set that can be defined on the basis of specific properties common to each of its members’.²⁵ This means that some romances are so similar as to form their own sub-branch of the romance ‘family tree’ – such as those romances often called ‘homiletic’ or the romances classed as ‘breton lais’ – but others may only share such broad similarities as an aristocratic protagonist or a happy ending.²⁶ Importantly for the present study, Cooper uses the ‘family resemblance’ model to discuss how genres change over time, noting that families change as new characteristics are introduced into the gene pool but that family members are still grouped by various resemblances, which

might lie in a certain shape of nose or mouth or colour of hair, or laughing in a particular way at a particular kind of joke, or manner of twitching one’s eyebrows, even though no one of those is essential for the resemblance to register, and even though individual features (hair colour, eyebrow habits) may contradict the model.²⁷

In keeping with this genetic metaphor, Cooper calls these familial traits ‘memes’. The complete set of romance ‘memes’ likely will not be present in each romance text, and some may only appear in later iterations of the genre, but some combination of the totality of extant tropes will feature across the romance corpus.

My own understanding of the genre aligns most closely with Liu’s notion of the romance ‘prototype’, a model similar to the ‘family resemblance’ theory. But Liu’s model centres on romance text’s self-definitions as evidence for medieval understandings of the category. Liu looks to lists of romance stories found in six Middle English sources, including Cursor Mundi, Speculum Vitae, Richard Coer de Lyon, Sir Thopas and the Laud Troy Book. In this way, Liu highlights the texts most likely to be evocative of the romance genre for English readers in the fourteenth century. Guy of Warwick, Bevis of Hampton and Charlemagne each appear in four out of the six lists that make up Liu’s corpus, suggesting that ‘a late medieval English poet, when required to name a subject for romance, would have thought more readily of Bevis of Hampton or Guy of Warwick, or even of Charlemagne, than (say) of Lancelot or Tristan’.²⁸ This does not mean that other texts are excluded from the category; rather, romances about Guy or Bevis might be considered ‘prototypical’, but other stories are still possible members of the category. If Middle English romance is a ‘prototype genre’, as Liu argues, it is one ‘defined not by its boundary but by its best examples’, and ‘some members of the category are considered better examples of that category than are others’.²⁹

The ‘prototype genre’ or the ‘family resemblance’ models work so well for romance because the genre in the medieval period was characterised by its multivocality. The medieval romance genre is elastic, and even a single narrative might exist in multiple, sometimes drastically different versions across different manuscripts. Further, a ‘romance’ text might take on characteristics of multiple genres at once, sometimes aligning more with history or, alternatively, hagiography. Still, a brief discussion of some qualities common to ‘prototypical’ romances will help clarify the contours of the genre, even if, given the genre’s breadth and flexibility, such a list is bound to be incomplete. The romances under consideration in this book most often contain an episodic, quest-like structure. Moreover, the romances under consideration here often end with the fulfilment of the protagonist’s desire – plot points like a marriage or dynasty-sustaining children – turning to the protagonist’s death only after a period of reunification and prosperity.³⁰ And finally, the medieval romances considered here often contain marvels, magic or miracles in the service of fulfilling desires and achieving happy endings. In terms of form, medieval English romances most often appear in verse (though Malory’s Morte is a notable exception), and they are often in rhyming couplets or tail-rhyme stanzas (though alliterative romances appear as well). In the manuscripts in which they appear, they are often grouped with other romance texts, as is the case with manuscripts like Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.2.38, but they do sometimes appear on their own.

If, as Liu argues, a medieval poet would turn to Bevis or Guy as romance prototypes, would a post-Reformation reader, printer or author do the same? A place to start in answering that question is to look to those texts included in York’s Database of Middle English Romance that also appeared in print. Nineteen such titles are extant (see Table 0.1). It is clear that the matters of Britain and England are well represented, as are romances influenced by the Constance/Eustace legend, that is romances featuring, in the words of Harriet Hudson, ‘exiled queens, orphaned children, and penitent fathers’.³¹ In terms of verse form, tail rhyme and couplets are represented almost equally, and, unsurprisingly, titles from the major medieval romance manuscripts appear frequently. Six of the nine romance titles present in Cambridge University Library, MS Ff.2.38 and about half of the romances present in the Auchinleck Manuscript (National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 19.2.1) also appear in sixteenth-century print.

These observations are a place to start, but I continue my exploration of the early modern conception of the romance genre more completely in the next chapter. In that chapter, I follow Liu’s methodology and look to lists, ‘catalogues’, of medieval romances from the early modern period. I find that Bevis of Hampton and Guy of Warwick remain prototypes of the genre, but I also argue that the genre expands in the early modern period to include texts we might today categorise as ‘jests’, stories far from the ‘great feats of arms’ and knightly adventures that Finlayson points to as key elements of the genre. Further, the next chapter demonstrates the ways in which printers’ paratexts shaped early modern conceptions of ‘medieval romance’ as a category, and we will see that printers developed a catalogue of romance woodcuts that might signal a group of texts’ generic