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Article Excerpt
Medievalists have been arguing about minstrels for nearly two and a half centuries. This argument is both older than, and fundamental to, medieval studies as an academic discipline. Indeed, perhaps the only older, longer-running argument in the study of medieval literature concerns editorial techniques, and that argument has itself often become tangled up in questions of oral composition. In England, the opening salvo came in Thomas Percy's 1765 Essay on the Ancient Minstrels, a work that envisioned a glorious, unbroken history of the minstrel as the "genuine successor" of Celtic bards and Germanic scalds, and "a privileged character" in the Norman and English courts. (1) Percy suggested that minstrels composed much of what they recited, and that their profession was a prestigious one. But soon after the appearance of Percy's essay, Joseph Ritson angrily attacked many of Percy's claims, arguing that the term minstrel was far less precise than Percy had implied, that minstrels did not compose their material, and their office was often humble, even disreputable. Ritson admitted that French minstrels may have had a different status, hut English minstrels, he argued, were widely regarded as (in the words of a sixteenth-century statute), "rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars." (2)
The arguments about minstrels have naturally shifted over the past 240 years, hut in many respects they have not progressed very far beyond the original positions taken up by Percy and Ritson. On the one side are those who see the historical record and the surviving texts of medieval romance, ballads, and other verse forms as bearing the marks of a rich, thriving culture of professional oral performance. In addition, this group, who might best be called the "romantic" or "nostalgic" school, often credit minstrels with having composed some surviving texts. On the other side are those skeptics who do not deny the existence of medieval minstrels, hut who question their talents, their social importance, and their role in the transmission of surviving texts. The romantics point to examples like Taillefer, the minstrel who supposedly led the Normans into the Battle of Hastings by reciting portions of the Chanson Roland. The disenchanted insist on debunking these myths and point instead to the signs of minstrels' vulgarity and low reputation. Where the romantics speak of minstrel composition, the disenchanted speak of minstrel decomposition, the degradation and corruption wrought by oral performers of limited talents. (3) Beginning with Thomas Wright, the romantics have characterized various manuscript materials as "minstrel books." (4) The disenchanted have questioned these characterizations, and in the important recent work of Andrew Taylor, challenged the existence of the entire category. (5)
Both sides have continually revisited the confusing tangle of terms for medieval performers. Historical records and literary texts do not apply these terms consistently, and the Latin, French, and English terms do not seem to correspond perfectly, so that distinguishing a minstrel from a harper, a joculator, a disour, a jongleur, or a histrio is not always possible, though each of these terms refer to different types of performance. Percy was thus able to construct a seamless tradition of oral performers by conveniently ignoring possible distinctions between the kinds of performers described in the records he cited. E. K. Chambers made a similar move in his magisterial survey of English performance, seeing an unbroken connection between performers of different periods: "The distinctively Anglo-Saxon types of scop and gleomon ... do not cease to exist [after 1066], but they go under ground ... until the fourteenth century brings the English tongue to its own again." (6) The disenchanted, following Ritson's initial complaint about Percy's misleading conflation of terms, have tended to insist that (in England) "minstrel" meant "musician" rather than singer or storyteller, and have thus questioned the prominence of orally delivered narrative. (7)
Over time, the disenchanted have gained the upper-hand, and the romantics have become distinctly less romantic. For example, Murray McGillivray, offering the strongest recent case for the importance of memory and oral performance in the transmission of Middle English romance, defends the idea of minstrel composition, but in terms that hardly uphold Percy's image of the noble bard: "each minstrel was partly an author, though mostly an unconscious one." (8) One of the more romantic of the recent Percyites, John Southworth, strikes a defiant tone that nevertheless suggests how effectively Percy's thesis has been challenged. Southworth concedes that "the historian will have some reservations to make" about popular myths of minstrelsy, "but all is not lost.... the popular image, however inaccurate in detail, contains a kernel of truth which, in the final analysis, may prove more important than scholarly quibbles." (9) Karl Reichl concludes in similarly double-edged terms that "despite the achievements of modern literary scholarship there is still good sense in Bishop Percy." (10) Another supporter of the idea of minstrel performance of Middle English romance, Michael Chesnutt, complains that much twentieth-century skepticism "represents absolutely no advance on Ritson's position," and this is surely right: it has been those scholars who have argued for the importance of minstrels who have been forced to change their arguments over time, rather than the doubters. (11)
At its core, this long-running argument is about the values and limits of nostalgia. On the one hand, Percy's romantic nostalgia provided considerable impulse for further study of minstrelsy, ballads, romance, and medieval culture more broadly. Middle English romance in particular would likely have been even more neglected than it has been by the past two centuries of scholarship were it not for the emotional appeal of Percy's nostalgia. And nostalgia usefully insists on the alterity of the Middle Ages, refusing to let present assumptions about authorship, circulation, and audience overshadow historical context. On the other hand, nostalgia inevitably prompts countering emotions of disenchantment, disillusionment, and disgust--the feelings of Ritson and his descendents. Minstrels thus become a means of imagining medieval culture as something other than the culture we know, or a means of insisting that medieval culture was not what we would like it to have been.
In this essay, I would like to argue that romantic nostalgia did not simply create the eighteenth-century argument about minstrels; romantic nostalgia--or at least romance nostalgia--created the medieval minstrel long before the antiquarians did. Percy did not romanticize the idea of minstrelsy so much as drag medieval romances' ideas of minstrelsy into a proto-academic domain of critical debate. Nowhere does this seem clearer than in Chambers's rhapsodic description of twelfth and thirteenth-century minstrelsy:
During the reigns of the Angevin and Plantagenet kings the minstrels were ubiquitous. They wandered at their will from castle to castle, and in time from borough to borough, sure of their ready welcome alike in the village tavern, the guildhall, and the baron's keep.... In the great castles, while lords and ladies supped or sat around the fire, it was theirs to while away many a long bookless evening with courtly geste or witty sally. At wedding or betrothal, baptism or knight-dubbing, treaty or tournament, their presence was indispensable. The greater festivities saw them literally in their hundreds, and rich was their reward in money and in jewels, in costly garments, and in broad acres. (12)
Only Chambers's studious footnotes, citing Wardrobe accounts and monastic chronicles, mark this as academic writing; his parataxis and piling up of detail closely resembles romance descriptio in its fondness for luxurious surplus. With the footnotes removed and the language archaized, the passage could have been lifted straight from Malory, the fifteenth-century nostalgia for an Arthurian golden age transmuted into twentieth-century nostalgia for Old England. Chambers has not merely read his nostalgia into his sources; he has reproduced the romances' own nostalgia.
It has always been possible to be nostalgic about minstrelsy and to romanticize the nature of minstrel performance, regardless of the present condition of minstrels. In other words, no one needed to wait for minstrels to disappear before regretting their disappearance; on the contrary, nostalgia may have even been a necessary precondition for enjoying minstrel performance. (13) Far from killing oft the idea of minstrelsy, increasing literacy among lower orders of society and the greater availability of texts for domestic reading may have ensured its continuing appeal. The following argument thus concerns itself more with the medieval myths of minstrelsy--and one manuscript's evocation of those myths in particular--rather than the realities. While popular representations of minstrel performance may have had only a tangential relationship to the historical circumstances of minstrelsy, these representations nevertheless had an enduring effect on English readers and their households. In imagining minstrel performance, these readers crafted an ideal image of domestic life centered around public readings at mealtime.
THE MEDIEVAL HOUSEHOLD MISCELLANY AND DOMESTIC AURALITY
Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Ashmole 61 has never been ignored, but it has never achieved much notoriety either. (14) For nearly a century, many presumed that Ashmole 61 was an example of Thomas Wright's invention, a minstrel manuscript or (more specifically) a "holster book," the books carried around in the saddle bags of medieval itinerants. (15) Recent scholarship has thoroughly reexamined this classification and has ended up abolishing it; no one now confidently claims that Ashmole 61 or any other surviving Middle English manuscript was owned or used by minstrels. (16) But Ashmole 61 still has interesting, unrecognized connections to minstrelsy, and may even be properly considered a "minstrel book," provided we rethink that category rather radically. And recognizing the powerful influence of minstrel myths over compilations like Ashmole 61 has important consequences for our understanding of late medieval domestic life.
The new taxonomic destination for Ashmole 61 has been a creation of the last few decades, "the household" or "family book." (17) Family books have been grouped together on...
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