The Alterity of Medieval Literature

ANS ROBERTJAUSS here gives an excellent account of three involved in reading old texts: first, immediate, prereflexive aesthetic experience; then awareness of of world of text; then discovery of meaning for us. I want to concentrate on second of these steps and make a few observations on how contributors to this issue treat what Jauss calls alterity of Middle Ages. My first observation is a general one. In very first sentence of his seminal book, Essai de poetique medievale (1972), Zumthor stressed l'eloignement du moyen age, la distance irrecuperable qui nous en separe; and a similar emphasis on sheer remoteness and otherness of period marks essays here. Thus, Warning, in his discussion of certain (admittedly outrageous) plays, speaks of their absolutely archaic and their insuperable hermeneutic strangeness. All contributors, in fact, seem to feel considerably further away from their Middle Ages than I feel from mine. I ask myself why this should be. One reason is that contributors are mostly concerned with continental, and especially French, literature. When Jauss speaks of repression of by aesthetic canons of Renaissance, for instance, his observation applies to French literature-to which, by a familiar and pardonable synecdoche, expression medieval literature commonly refers. But in some other countries, including England, this suppressing and distancing of during Renaissance period was a much more partial affair than it was in France. Writers such as Spenser and Herbert (and some would add Shakespeare) in England display a cultural continuity with their predecessors; and this continuity makes a surprising difference, for students of English like myself, to our sense of eloignement du moyen age. The other reason why contributors' emphasis on strangeness of Middle Ages itself strikes me as strange lies, not in history of sixteenth-century literature, but in history of twentieth-century universities. Jauss observes that the study of of European Middle Ages . . . has lost its place in

Alterity · Art · Epistemology · Medieval European Literature and History · Medieval Literature and History · Philosophy · Renaissance Literature and Culture

• Chaucer's gender‐oriented philosophy in The Canterbury Tales

  Open Access•Malek J Zuraikat•Literature Compass•2023

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