Reviewed by Jane Toswell
University of Western Ontario
mjtoswel@uwo.ca
After his retirement as Tolkien Professor of Middle English in the University of Oxford, Douglas Gray (1930-2017) turned his considerable learning and intelligence to the writing of books about medieval literature, synthesizing his own deep and rich investigations into the readers and writers who prepared those texts, and into those who received and transformed medieval texts and ideas in their own day. At his death he left two near-complete manuscripts, an anthology and this book, lovingly assembled and with scholarly apparatus added by Jane Bliss, with help offered (as she puts it) by numerous other Oxford medievalists chasing down particularly tricky references.
The book itself offers a genial study of the reception history of the Middle Ages in English, beginning with the visit in August 1829 of Felix Mendelssohn to Fingal’s Cave on the isle of Staffa west of Scotland. Gray points to the procession of nineteenth-century figures to this musical cave, traceable to the visit of Joseph Banks (the scientist who traveled with Captain Cook) and his account of that visit in a 1772 publication. He uses these details to point to his opening themes about the opposed but also interlocking attitudes taken by scholars and antiquarians on the one hand, and poets and creative writers on the other. His thesis is that these two approaches, the erudite study and the passionate engagement, have co-existed fruitfully in this field, with its rediscoveries and its continuities, as different generations encountered medieval literature and responded to it. I’ll note in passing that although the book reveals Gray’s comprehensive knowledge of several European languages and literatures, the focus is entirely (and without conscious statement) on the post-medieval reception (almost entirely by men) of what we would today call literary texts written in the English vernacular in the medieval period. That is to say, the book begins with a significant number of underlying assumptions that remain unquestioned.
Part I discusses the beginnings of this journey, starting in the fifteenth century with the use of medieval authors and their availability in early modern materials. Gray points to various uses of Gower, Lydgate, and Langland, but notes that “Chaucer is the dominant presence” (11). The focus here tends to be on continuities with the Middle Ages more than rediscovery, although as the opening indicates there are also echoes and new developments. The argument particularly highlights the continuity of romances, retold in chapbooks and even single sheets, greatly influencing writers such as Edmund Spenser and John Bunyan. Sir John Mandeville’s Travels had a particularly active afterlife, even being reworked and reprinted until the nineteenth century. The most fascinating echoes, however, belong to the drama and the corpus of songs, lyrics, and carols, two genres which Gray knows very well. The chapter points to many medieval motifs, figures, and concerns in Shakespeare, continuing performances of miracle and mystery plays, and even to possible elements drawn from the lost tradition of popular drama. It analyses several examples of carols and lyrics that are or seem to be medieval in their language and expression, and in their particular approach to Christianity. The last section of the chapter starts with religious literature, pointing out the similarities between Catholic and Protestant writings, before turning to the early antiquaries for their role in keeping medieval materials safe, and to some extent studied. Gray notes that figures such as John Aubrey, John Leland, and Robert Cotton were not interested in literature, but their activities in the service of language, history and law meant that literary texts survived for their utility on other fronts.
Chapter two begins with a survey of Continental antiquaries and approaches to the medieval from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries before turning to England and moving forward to the eighteenth century. Gray discusses seventeenth-century French scholarship, notably of romances, to offer a more sophisticated parallel to his detailed analysis of English antiquarians and their work collecting and editing medieval texts. He offers a detailed analysis of the reception history of King Alfred, and pauses also on George Hickes and Thomas Hearne. Gray then turns back the clock to look at the historiography of specific medieval writers, again focusing on Chaucer with his most estimable editor, Thomas Tyrwhitt, and critic, John Dryden. He next spends substantial time considering the revival of ballads in the eighteenth century, pointing to the continuities these texts and their editions or manuscripts imply, and focusing on Percy’s Reliques both in terms of Percy’s decisions to polish and update his texts and in terms of the language used by imitators (Johnson, as Gray explains, famously derided this style). The chapter finishes with the shift towards literary history promulgated by Percy, his predecessor Richard Hurd, and the humane and comprehensive scholarship of “the first great historical critic of English literature, Thomas Warton” (83).
The next section of the book addresses various trends in the eighteenth century, beginning with primitivism. Gray points out that this impulse is not simply about nostalgia for a better past, but a belief in previous innocence, honesty, and justice. Here he takes for his examples the native peoples of the Pacific and their interactions with explorers, and points to the two contradictory approaches of primitivism: the urge to see the primitivist peoples as children or ignorant, and the urge to see them as noble and glorious. Gray uses these observations to investigate more deeply the complex question of Ossian as ‘presented’ by James Macpherson, and the ‘Rowley’ poems of Thomas Chatterton; the former engages in “a largely uninformed enthusiastic romanticism” (96) though pecuniary advances were probably also on his mind, while the latter evades a clear understanding of his pseudo-fifteenth-century poetry, written (as Gray kindly suggests) when there was not yet a firm understanding of the notion of ‘the truth of fiction’ (100). To these two experimental medievalists, Gray adds the “runic poetry” of the time and, by extension, the “Celtic poetry” lauding bloodthirsty chiefs and warriors. In this vein also belong the many translations over several centuries of “The Battle of Brunanburh,” the last of which was that of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. Gray identifies Thomas Gray as the most successful of these poets, and quotes especially from “The Bard,” which ends with the Poet plunging from “the mountain’s height...to endless night.” Clearly this kind of material presages Romanticism, and the second half of this section reviews the eighteenth century as a whole, pausing for extended discussion of Samuel Johnson’s interest in romance and his travels in Scotland, and following the train of thought forward by way of antiquarians (Joseph Ritson, George Ellis) almost to the end of the nineteenth century with Sir Walter Scott. With Scott, Gray suggests, “we first detect a genuine sense of period” (121).
The next chapter, “Part 4,” turns to the nineteenth century, beginning with a survey of how medievalisms in religion, then chivalry, and lastly thought are perceived, mostly in England but with some comparison, especially to France. Referring, for example to the Gothic tales of Mary Shelley, Bram Stoker, and R.L. Stevenson, Gray characteristically offers a passive sentence, with which he seems to agree: “It has been argued that this was not simply escapism, but provided a rich, powerful language of images and styles appropriate for the expression of deep-seated anxieties, social and psychological fears” (132). Gray then turns to a broader European survey noting that medievalism is a hugely influential presence, and one often touching upon the major thinkers of the late nineteenth century. Gray focuses on Germany and France, but notes other influences and accomplishments in passing, such as Donizetti’s opera Alfredo il Grande (for Alfred the Great, here fighting off a Danish adversary named Atkins). Gray touches upon Matthew Arnold’s lectures on Celtic literature when he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and then upon the growth of study and imitation of Northern tales, including Thiodolf the Icelander, by “A Mr. Gordon,” which contrasts the scenery and customs of the Mediterranean against Iceland. Gray then briefly summarizes German medievalism, with special focus on music and scholarship, and ends the chapter with French medievalism, notably Victor Hugo, Viollet-le-Duc, and the cathedral.
The next chapter explicitly returns to England in the nineteenth century, with the opening thesis that “medievalism of one kind or another seems to have had some influence on almost every writer in England” (149) in the period. Gray begins with Thomas Carlyle’s “gift of breathing life into the past” (150) before turning to the pre-Raphaelites and the discovery by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones of a copy of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in an Oxford bookshop in 1855. Malory is, of course, the focus of Tennyson’s Idylls of the King, and Gray offers an extended defence of these poems for their treatment of character, their appeal to the ear, and their search for political order and good government. The chapter then turns to the poetry of William Morris, first his early works, then his version of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and then his verse epic Sigurd the Volsung. News from Nowhere perhaps receives the most attention, and Gray is most intrigued by Morris’s ideas about language, and his experimentation with dialect, with medieval usage, with simplicity of expression. To complete his review of the nineteenth century, Gray briefly discusses the language experimentation of George Borrow and, in particular, the linguistic purism and Dorset language of William Barnes.
Borrow and Barnes open the door to Gray’s last section, on “the philologists,” a group very great in number in the nineteenth century. He begins with the rise of institutions, including universities, focusing on the teaching of English and the founding of libraries. He finds a new line of argument through Max Müller, describing his lectures on the importance of the English language: “it stands in the system of the intellectual world as light stands in the system of the physical world, comprising all, penetrating all, and revealing all” (174). Scholars in the English and European tradition are joined by an American tradition. Gray specifically considers Francis Douce, Andrew Lang, and G.K. Chesterton. The main part of his argument, however, concerns the rise of scholarly study of Old English and Middle English and runs through F.J. Furnivall, James Murray, Henry Sweet, W.W. Skeat, H.C. Chadwick, Joseph Wright, and A.S. Napier, all described by Gray as being from Oxford. He finishes the survey with W.P. Ker, quoting W.H. Auden’s opinion of his excellent writing, before turning to discussion of two major figures in America: Mark Twain and Henry Adams. As throughout the book, his idea is to address both the creative reconstruction of medieval materials and the scholarly analysis taking place in the United States. He thus addresses Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court at some length, especially on its double narrator, the practical Yankee and the more sensitive author, and on the grim ending. Following the lead of Alice Chandler, who analysed Henry Adams’s Mont Saint Michel and Chartres in her 1970 book A Dream of Order, Gray describes Adams as celebrating a lost civilization, “with some hints of nostalgia, but an overwhelming sense of joy and potential liberation in a new situation” (197). Gray is particularly struck by Adams’s “full and powerful account” of the role of women, by his analysis of how Chartres Cathedral was built for its apse, for the Virgin. Mostly, Adams points to the expressive nature of the cathedrals, to how the Gothic architecture of the eleventh and twelfth centuries show what those centuries had to say.
With these works Gray is already well into the twentieth century; his short final section, “Part 7,” points to its varied medievalisms. He gestures in various directions, to folktales, songs, the research and publications of W.B. Yeats, the new genre of fantasy literature, and notably James Joyce with a very long quotation from his paean of medievalizing praise to the Boulevard Saint-Michel which turns into a statement that Ireland is fundamentally medieval and the modern world is similarly becoming a world of extremes–an unexpected turn of events in the epilogue. Gray does not analyse the Joycean monologue at all. Instead, he offers a brief envoi, noting that his book has run from Fingal’s Cave to Camelot, but the latter remains mysterious and uncertain, a resting place for us now to think “of the dreams, enthusiasm...affection and love which the rediscovering of medieval literature brought” (207).
Gray offers an astonishing number of fascinating details: that Spenser’s depiction of battle with a dragon in The Faerie Queene depends on the medieval romance Bevis of Hampton for some of its details (17); that Coleridge’s father burned his copy of a favourite medieval romance (18); that Samuel Johnson was interested in feudalism, that Sir Walter Scott’s Quentin Durward often quotes from and alludes to the medieval romance The Squyr of Lowe Degre, and much more. None of these points has a footnote, presumably because for Gray these matters are common knowledge. Every sentence, however, is dense with thoughtful argument and with new ways to think about the reception and recreation of the medieval in ensuing centuries–up to the end of the nineteenth century. In fact, nearly every page opens a new field of possible thesis topics or studies in medievalism, partly because Gray is less interested in medievalism as a field of study than he is in looking at medieval literary elements continuing in ensuing centuries (some might say this is a distinction without a difference). However, Gray does not delve much into how ideas and motifs are changed and redeployed, or how a particular carol retains its medieval wording but medieval popular drama survives only in hints. His interest lies in the fact of that survival, and its cultural and historical context.
Leit-motifs run through the book, notably the French literary historian La Curne de Sainte-Palaye on questions of chivalry, but also Captain Cook, notions of orientalism and the exotic, nifty anecdotes about practice in New Zealand, the strong opinions of Dr. Johnson, J.R.R. Tolkien, and always Gray’s underlying motif of Mercury and Philology, those passionate and empowered by the Middle Ages to create new works of art, and those studying and editing its works.
It is difficult to assess this book. On the one hand, it is a true pleasure to read the thoughtful writings of Douglas Gray on a newish topic for him, though it is one that flows from both his anthologies and edited texts and his own considerations of themes and ideas and genres of later medieval literature. His learning was vast but also kind, and the kindness shines through here; he is loath to condemn James Macpherson and Thomas Rowley for their flights of medievalizing imagination. Basically, he wants to find opportunities and new ways of engaging with the afterlife of medieval texts, never to close down options for study. At times here the work is old-fashioned and sometimes it seems that Gray would have read and included the work of modern scholars of medievalism such as Rebecca Brackman (on the Renaissance response to early medieval England), Clare Simmons on ballads and lyrics, Dustin Frazier Wood on antiquarianism in the eighteenth century, and Tom Shippey on Norse attitudes to death, to name but a few. Some of the references here are pretty outdated and seem a bit blinkered–but, this was a last work by a scholar whose humane and generous soul wanted to point out some ways forward for thinking about the afterlife of medieval texts. In this book, Douglas Gray has most certainly accomplished that goal. Jane Bliss has done us all a favour in making it available to us–particularly to researchers looking (but with an eye to more recent scholarship) for possible projects.
