To this first volume of the Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature fall the important tasks of establishing what ‘Classical reception’ and ‘English literature’ might mean in the very earliest stages of their existence. In setting the scene for her own as well as later volumes, C.’s introduction therefore underlines the unique character of the Classical reception practised in this period, given the continuing familiarity with Latin in its medieval form, the co-existence of Latinate and vernacular literary cultures and the multilingualism of medieval England. C. describes the receptive practices of the medieval period as an ‘enlarging engagement’ with the Classics, a mode of continuity, that fed into the intuitively different ‘generative moment’ of early humanism (p. 1) experienced in England in the fifteenth century. The distinctively different yet related practices of medieval Latinity and early humanism are invoked and compared throughout the book: as later, already-published volumes of the series also demonstrate, there are many ‘classicisms’ operative in English literary culture at any historical moment, and antiquity is constantly mediated and re-formed by the processes of commentary, translation and adaptation.
This volume is not divided into parts or sections, although it does fall implicitly into three conceptual phases by virtue of the broadly chronological chapters. These phases might be given labels such as ‘experiencing the Classics’ (from the title of Chapter 3, on medieval education); ‘vernacular classicism’ (typified by Chaucer); and ‘early Tudor humanism’. The first eleven chapters survey the ground of medieval Latinity as manifested in schooling, libraries, commentaries, and encyclopaedic, historical and scientific writings as well as literary texts. These chapters elucidate what C. calls the ‘dense experience’ (p. 2) of antiquity in all aspects of medieval culture and its status as a ‘porous’ category with ‘boundaries neither temporally nor ideologically fixed’ (p. 10). Christians writing in Latin such as Boethius and antique Judaism, ubiquitous in the important genre of universal history, are as much a part of medieval England's Classical heritage as Roman poets long granted canonical status.
The institutional contexts through which antiquity was accessed are described in Chapters 2–6, covering Latin teaching and the primers, textbooks, glosses and commentaries that were used in education, typically in imitation of methods established in France during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Certain themes that recur throughout the volume emerge here, such as the continuities between the antique and the medieval that were ensured by the dedicated copying of Classical manuscripts in Anglo-Saxon England; the common core of imitable practice identified in Virgil, Ovid and Lucan (mythological incident, stylistic virtuosity and the depiction of strong emotion); and the integration of Christian vocabulary and theology into the teaching of Classical material. Anglo-Saxon England was highly Latinate, exhibiting familiarity with the Latin classics including Virgil and Cicero, and laying the groundwork for the important role played by Boethius and dialectical enquiry in the development of secular, vernacular literature in the twelfth century (Chapters 2–4, 9 and 14). As W. Black points out in Chapter 5 on the quadrivium, Anglo-Saxon England also enjoyed a ‘vibrant medical culture’ (p. 85) and produced the only substantial body of medical literature in the early middle ages, most of which still awaits modern editors.
Libraries and the material texts they housed are of recurrent interest to the contributors. J. Willoughby in Chapter 6 outlines the formation of the great monastic libraries and the methods of information technology fostered in the lives of teachers and preachers, such as the florilegium as a ‘searchable resource of edifying or elegant excerpta’ (p. 107); the archetypally humanist enterprise of the index was a natural extension, facilitated by the invention of printing, of this medieval desire to organise and re-deploy for current purposes the vast and varied body of antique learning. As shown by the example of Peterhouse library in Cambridge, with its extensive holdings of Aristotle, while it is possible to identify much common ground centred on the educational curriculum in library holdings, there are also significant localisations and specialisations to be acknowledged and explored.
Classical mythography, symbolised by Ovid, takes centre stage in Chapters 7–10. What N. Zeeman calls the ‘paradox of authority’ (p. 122), whereby the ancients were revered yet critiqued for their lack of Christian revelation, led to the elaboration of moralising glosses and the Stoicising of myth to bring it within a Christian world view. By the time of Boccaccio in the fourteenth century, this ‘exegetical drive’ (p. 136) was fully embedded in, and often indistinguishable from, the literature and philosophy of antiquity. The idea of the author and his career (notably Virgil) also came to the fore at this time, with an emphasis on reading the Classical text for intentio and utilitas (Chapter 8), and the myth-histories of Rome, Troy and Thebes offered models for new kinds of quasi-national poetry in France, England and Scotland from the twelfth century onwards, at the same time as they warned of the manifold perils inherent in ‘unsteady politics’ of all ages (p. 469; Chapters 9, 11–13, 22). More than 400 medieval manuscripts of Lucan survive, and the Bellum civile (or Pharsalia) ‘sweats from the pores’, as A. Hiatt puts it, of twelfth-century English histories (p. 212).
The transition into the second phase of this book takes place in W. Wetherbee's Chapter 12, which examines the use made of Statius’ Thebaid by Dante, Boccaccio and Chaucer. The poem's combination of ‘tragic realism and visionary transcendence’ (p. 227) meant that it underpinned the French romans d'antiquité, the learned poems that instituted the vernacularisation of Classical culture from the twelfth century onwards by blending it with the contemporary concerns of romance and courtly politics. The political re-tuning of Classical philosophy and history typifies the engagements of the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, for example in the labelling of Gower and Chaucer as moral philosophers, and Lydgate's concern with establishing a secular political manifesto based on classically-derived notions of the common good and public utility (Chapters 15, 21–2), or the use of Classical historiography and political biography to justify holding up a ruler to judgement (Chapter 16). Christianity, of course, informed all of these endeavours, and so as well as the enduring example of Boethius, the allegorical poetry of Prudentius and Biblical epics modelled on Virgil played a part in the period's sustained blending of Christian thought into pagan antiquity (Chapter 17).
The third phase of the book is introduced by D. Wakelin's chapter on early humanism (Chapter 23), particularly the self-conscious claim of new-ness made by proponents of the studia humanitatis. Wakelin's thesis is very much one of evolution rather than rupture: he points out that twelfth-century manuscripts continued to be used by humanists, even as the building of collections such as that of Duke Humfrey showed signs of a deliberate re-drawing of the map of learning. Both Wakelin and J. Carley, in his survey of Henrician humanism in Chapter 24, proceed with caution when it comes to identifying what was uniquely ‘humanist’ about these decades, but agree that some of the common factors in a diverse range of activities would have included a concern with textual authenticity; a revival of Greek learning (Greek texts being known prior to this in Latinised form); an interest in government and civic virtue; a self-conscious desire to recover the literary remains of ancient and more recent cultures; a concern with pedagogy and eloquence (whether Latin or vernacular); and an interest in technical innovations in agriculture, medicine and warfare. Perhaps humanism's greatest achievement was in the liberty it granted to indigenous experimentation, whether in the form of Skelton's ‘vituperative’ English satire (p. 542) assessed in Chapter 25 by D. Carlson or the ‘hybrid classicism’ (p. 587), glancing and cultivated, of Wyatt and Surrey, whose verses frame individualised struggles against a backdrop of cultural re-invention (Chapters 27–8). Re-invention is, indeed, the leitmotif of this highly successful book, which bears eloquent witness to the dynamism and creativity of the period's ‘cultural saturation’ (p. 8) in antiquity.
