Muddling through the Medieval

Perhaps Linkin Park’s “Somewhere I Belong” is not the best song about “belonging” that could have popped into my mind when thinking about the place of early Middle English instruction in the Old English curriculum, but it captures the abandonment, resentment, and identity confusion that I think the period should feel. After years of scholarly neglect and dismissal, the last 20 years or so have shown a gradual rediscovery of the period, as well as the first proper scholarship on many of the texts. What we still haven’t accomplished is to locate early Middle English texts well enough in our medieval English curriculum. Unless you’re discussing female devotional texts or instructions for the female religious (The Wooing Group and the Katherine Group are great examples), or maybe looking at French influence in the “rise” of early Middle English in The Owl and the Nightingale, you probably don’t include much early Middle English in your courses. It doesn’t matter that the vast majority of these texts are homiletic in nature; they should still be studied. Do we not read the works of Ælfric, Wulfstan, and Alfred the Great in Old English courses? Do we not read hagiographies in both Old and Middle English courses? Do we not read religious poetry in Old and Middle English courses? If you have answered in the affirmative to all of these questions, then you have no right in dismissing the early Middle English literature at your disposal, especially when it can bring Old and Middle English literature into a more productive discourse with each other. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve told people in Middle English classes, “Yeah, that happens in Old English literature, too,” or, in Old English classes, “Yeah, that survives into the later periods, too.” What it boils down to, I think, is that we ignore early Middle English when creating courses because we cannot force it into the neat boxes of categorization that university registrars and departments especially like.

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