Texts and Territories

The writing of a literary text is as a retrospective explanation of what is happening in the present, including social, cultural, religious, and political events, and is a deliberate re-creation in actual practice. The impact of immediate contemporary concerns places a literary text at least partly outside the author’s control. The author responds to a given context of historical and cultural incident that limits his freedom to invent, adapt, or explain. Of these contemporary concerns, the literary text is concerned first with how cultural practices and cultural changes helped to create it, and second with what happens when specific historical events appear to model themselves on narrative structures, and how those events can be given a conscious boost by narrative authors or patrons to make the parallels even closer. History turns into literary narrative, or literary narrative turns into history; therefore, literature and history live in each other’s pockets. The medieval texts that straddle the borderland between literature and history—what has been called a medieval fashion for pseudo-history—have been repeatedly commented on over the years. However, the broader implications of this phenomenon for the modern understanding of medieval concepts of the past and historiography have been under-explored. This volume engages with the history and the literary narrative in Medieval England through a variety of approaches to an interdisciplinary array of texts (ranging from Latin, Old-French, Anglo-Norman to Middle English) between the eleventh and fifteenth centuries.