Negotiating the Past

The field of literary studies is today both energized and divided by the concept of history. There is on the one hand a renewed insistence that criticism must foreground the historicity of texts, that to ignore their historical siting is not just to risk misinterpretation but to conceal the critic's own immersion within a historical process that both conditions his understanding and solicits his engagement. Yet there is also no clear agreement on how historicism is to be practiced: voices on the left promoting various forms of Marxism, cultural materialism, and New Historicism are met by both an established concern to preserve canons of critical scholarship and a traditional liberal humanism dismayed by the erasure of the individual apparently entailed by the newer critical formations. In this book, Lee Patterson surveys this terrain in terms of the scholarly discipline that has traditionally insisted upon the priority of the historical, Medieval Studies. Questioning the ability of theory to overcome the dilemmas inherent in historicism, Patterson focuses rather on specific scholarly projects and interpretive question.
Thus he analyzes, for instance, the history of both Chaucerian scholarship and textual criticism to reveal the unacknowledged political agendas that governed their development, and yet he also interprets specific medieval texts from the 12th through the 15th centuries to show that the problems of the historical imagination that seem quintessentially modern are in fact transhistorical. Patterson demonstrates that historical thinking is constituted by a set of oppositions that can never finally be resolved but must on the contrary be continually renegotiated. Scholars and students of medieval studies, comparative literature, and literature and language programmes generally should appreciate this close scholarly analysis of the traditional procedures of medieval studies in terms of current theortical thinking about historicism. Lee Patterson is Professor of English and Chairman of the Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Duke University. His work has appeared in ELH, Speculum, and other journals.