Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages ed. by Mark Chinca and Christopher Young (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages ed. by Mark Chinca and Christopher Young Wendy Scase Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages. Ed. by Mark Chinca and Christopher Young. (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 2022. xii+ 339 pp. £75. ISBN 978–1–108–47764–2. The contributors to Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages were asked to address the question 'When and how did literature begin in your vernacular?' (p. xi). The essays, covering literatures from Arabic to Welsh, address this brief in different ways. Some speculate on the social, linguistic, and material conditions that shape literary emergence. Stephen G. Nichols's Foreword sets the scene with a case study of the famously multilingual Strasbourg Oaths (ce 842), in which multilingualism, Nichols suggests, marks 'sociocultural hierarchies, a phenomenon that becomes ever more pronounced with the subsequent advent of court culture' (p. 3). Laura Ashe argues that the emergence of Old English literature was 'reliant on the highest levels of society for both audience and patronage' (p. 77), whereas Middle English appeared 'in a strange combination of ephemerality, necessity, and ambition' (p. 84). Fritz van Oostrom tells the story of early Dutch literature in terms of language contact—which he suggests 'may well be a fundamental condition for any literary beginning' (p. 137). Denis Hult reflects on the conditions that led to the establishment of a French literary tradition in England 'at least a generation' before the foundation of one on the Continent (p. 118). Roberta Frank's lively essay on Scandinavia describes beginnings as a hybrid of European models of textuality and local traditions. Other contributors focus on terms and categories. For Mark Chinca and Christopher Young the beginnings of German literature depend on what one means by 'literature'. For Sarah Kay, 'beginnings' are recognizable only in hindsight, and are different from 'openings' that have many possible futures—or none. Occitan literature begins 'only after several centuries of openings' (p. 165). Marina S. Brownlee asks what counts as 'Spain' when cultural and political boundaries are shifting and porous. Certain chapters are concerned with the history of literatures for which there is no or little contemporaneous evidence. Barry Lewis's chapter on Irish and Welsh reconstructs the earliest literary activity in Irish using later evidence and cautious inference, but 'the evidence is too fragmentary' (p. 64) for this method to work for Welsh. K. P. Clarke treats fragments of early Italian vernacular poetry as evidence for literary beginnings, contrasting these serendipitous survivals (e.g. a fragment used as a book cover) with three songbooks from c. 1300 that mark the end of the beginning. Simon Franklin outlines the problematic evidence for a tradition of East Slavonic court literature. The Tale of Igor's Campaign 'laments the passing of a golden age of Rus strength in unity' (p. 290) but the manuscript was discovered (apparently) in the 1790s and burnt in Moscow in 1812. It may have been a forgery. Perhaps the most exciting chapters call for understanding of literary beginnings [End Page 580] as 'a dynamic part of a broader interconnected medieval European literary system' (p. 267), as Panagiotis A. Agapitos puts it in his critique of vernacular and learned categories in the study of medieval Greek literature. Julia Verkholantsev's brilliant chapter on Czech and Croatian uses Iurii Lotman's model of literature as a dynamic semiotic system, proposing that it provides a way of moving beyond histories organized around the principle of a literature in a national (vernacular) language' (p. 249). And yet this systemic approach is not without its problems, as David Wallace's Afterword reminds us: seeking a literary system can lead to a 'totalising narrative' (p. 302) that normalizes cultural centres and peripheries as givens. One hopes that some future volume will find ways of pursuing the agenda modelled by Verkholantsev and Agapitos while paying due regard to Wallace's cautions. Although Literary Beginnings in the European Middle Ages aims to disrupt our uniform concept of a national language' (p. 18) and ideas that literatures have an uninterrrupted history down to the present day' (p. 19), the volume is organized around modern national languages...