Inscriptions In British Literature: From Runes To The Rise Of Public Poetry

Abstract

From the retreat of the Roman Empire until the rise of the Tudors, medieval Britain’s landscape was a veritable palimpsest on which successive conquerors sought to leave their marks. The topic of inscriptionality and the inscribed material object requires the scholar of medieval British literature to make both cultural and temporal distinctions. Anglo-Saxon poetry reminds us that the Britain encountered by the tribes migrating from northwest Germany, the Netherlands, and Denmark in the fifth to the seventh centuries was littered with traces of earlier cultures: both the mythical, the race of “giants” whose monuments they viewed in Stonehenge, and the historical, the Latinised Celts pushed from their Roman centres to the fringes of the island. A few centuries later, the Anglo-Saxon society that had begun to coalesce into an “English” culture through the literary labours of the Church and monarchs such as King Alfred the Great (849–899) was disrupted by another military incursion from the Continent. The linguistic and literary shifts precipitated by the Norman invasion in 1066 would take another two centuries of a distinct Anglo-Norman ruling class to resolve into the Middle English tradition familiar to readers of Chaucer or Malory. Since the different periods of literary history in medieval England discourage a strictly chronological account, this chapter is divided into three thematic sections: writing artefacts and cultural difference; public and private forms of texts; and inscriptionality in the rise of an “English” literary tradition. Consequently, even as Anglo-Saxon texts will, of necessity, feature more prominently in our discussion of cultural difference, and late Middle English ones in our account of the literary tradition that emerges in the period, each section will develop a thematic argument with reference to texts from multiple periods.1