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I'm Dr. Laura Ashe and I teach Medieval Literature and Shakespeare at Worcester College Oxford and lecturer in the faculty,

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and I work on the whole mediaeval period, but mostly from sort of late Anglo-Saxon up into the 14th century and Chaucer.

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And at the moment, in fact, I'm writing a big book for the Oxford University Press,

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which is going to be on the period from ten hundred thirteen fifty.

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And it's very important to me that I'm crossing from the Anglo-Saxon world forward into the Middle Ages as we think about it.

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But on some levels, that's a bit of a terrible period to work on because typically people would have thought that wasn't a period.

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It comes after Beowulf and before Chaucer.

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And if you ask a normal person whether they can name anything written between Chaucer, I think you'd be quite likely to come up short.

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But the reason that I'm completely fascinated with the period is that I think it's actually when someone has

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important cultural changes happened and some of the most important literary developments and in particular,

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I mean, what I've done a lot of work on is the romance. The romance really is the forerunner of the novel.

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And I think it's in this period when the romance is invented,

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what we really see is the invention of fiction, and that happens bang in the centre of my period.

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And that's why I'm so excited about what does one mean when they talk about romance? Well, so it's a bit of a misnomer.

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Originally, when authors started saying they were writing romances, they just meant they were writing in French rather than Latin Hollman in French.

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But very rapidly these works started to develop a particular sort of character.

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They were secular. They were about knights and ladies and adventures, and you'd follow an individual on his quest and so on.

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This is the idea that we're still very familiar with because it's so popular at the moment.

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In popular culture, there's a focus on love, which is typical, a focus on unreal events.

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You know, often these knights fight giants or dragons or something.

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But what is real is that the romance is highly concerned with ethical behaviour, with how one should approach the troubles of others,

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with relations between men and women, with relations between kings and their servants or lords and their men.

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And so that really an arena which in the Middle Ages was used to explore questions about how people ought to conduct their lives.

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So romance is a code of behaviour.

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So the code of behaviour mostly associated with romance is chivalry, but chivalry itself is a complete can of worms.

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Just recently,

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my research has gone into trying to think about where she really came from and what enabled it to become an idealised code of behaviour.

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So erm, we think of chivalry, I guess we think of holding doors open,

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but in the Middle Ages it really was a developed ideal whereby aristocratic men and to a lesser extent women could believe that their way of life,

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the things that were essential to them were actually ethically valuable. And the reason that's important is because, of course,

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Christianity fundamentally for centuries had been telling mediaeval aristocrats that

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they were going to [INAUDIBLE] because in their daily lives they committed violence

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and they had adulterous relationships and they indulged in conspicuous consumption

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because you have to spend a lot of money and you have to fight and so on and so on.

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And so this entire ruling class had known that they were going to [INAUDIBLE].

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And then when in the 12th century, you get this sudden efflorescence of idealisation of the night life,

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idealisation of courtly life, aristocratic life,

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I think that serves a real fundamental social, cultural purpose for these people, that suddenly they're told your lives are not worthless.

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It cannot be that God hates you because, look, the world loves you.

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The sense that a secular ideal that could somehow stand against the daming ideals of Christianity

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that say you should give away all your wealth and you should never commit violence. And so chivalry is nurtured in the romances.

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It's developed there. It's explored there. And it's that that I think then becomes an interdependent.

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The literature feeds life and the life feeds literature. Chivalry is quite problematic notion, isn't it, because it conflicts, as you say,

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directly with the Christian ideals of turn the other cheek and love thy neighbour.

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Yes, absolutely. And the way that the two were somehow made to come together, I think was a very important idea, of course, is the Crusades.

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So the sudden idea that if you were fighting for God, then you're fighting would be virtuous.

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But of course, not all knights went on crusade all the time. So the real question was,

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how do you justify a nightly life that you're living at home when you're just being a great lord and punishing rebels and so on?

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And the answer was, I think for them, just a sense that we are copying the virtues of our ancestors.

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The idea of a lot of romance was that it was displaced into the distant past.

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And so there'd be this vision of then was a golden age.

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Now we don't live in a golden age, but if we behave in this way, if we hold these ideals, then we can somehow reclaim it.

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But the problem, the clash between chivalry and Christianity was never resolved.

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I mean, this literature just couldn't resolve it. And you can see this when you think of the emergence, say, of the great.

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And the Grail night, this is really a matter of automatic logic if you think that the idea of chivalry

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is to become a better and better person than in mediaeval Christian Europe,

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that can only mean getting closer to God. And so the ultimate quest rapidly becomes a Christian quest.

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But then, of course, a Christian quest is completed by dying and being taken up to heaven.

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And then we have the spectacle of the other nights, the ones who don't achieve Grail Quest being left at court, having failed.

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And that really haunts the romance, this problem that it can't square the circle between Christian virtue and shimmering virtue.

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So it's actually easy to see romance as a secular genre.

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You say that's true. Yeah. I mean, one thing about the Middle Ages is you can basically say there's no such thing as secular writing.

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There are only secular topics. You know this because it's not optional.

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The ideals of Christianity are always there.

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You can sort of nudge them to one side or you can pretend that they're not the business of the text, but they're always there.

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But inasmuch as anything is secular in the Middle Ages, romance, certainly, particularly with the love of.

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Can you give us an example? Well, of course, the two most famous pairs of lovers are Tristan, and he's who I talked about in the lecture on romances.

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I mean, the ideal of Tristan and Isolde is just a towering symbol of idealised love, which is worth dying for.

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And this, of course, in itself is a highly secular ideal. To say that you should die for earthly love is dangerous.

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And this played out in different ways, in different texts.

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And often the claim was made that their earthly love was was ennobling, was was like a Christian love.

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But that's not what the earliest text said.

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And then the other famous couple, of course, Lancelot and Guinevere, and hear the desperate love triangle with King Arthur.

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I mean, Tristan is in a love triangle with King Mark, but King Mark has never had quite the attraction of King Arthur.

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And here it's interesting that it does either romances just tell episodes from that story and it's beautiful but fraught,

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or when they bring it to its end.

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This one is ended with the fact that they have to give one another up and the ending of the Syrian legends in various versions,

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both Lancelot and Guinevere and to the church, they give each other up and therefore they get the good death and they get to go to heaven.

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But it's notable that that's that's one way of rescuing. But you have to take them away from their love to do so.

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So secular love is quite subversive in this period. Is that quite indicative of the creativity of that evil period?

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I mean, the creativity in this period is extreme, but it's also not the kind of not the same as we would envisage creativity's being now.

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I mean, we have an obsession with complete newness. The new something is if you've never seen it before, the better.

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Whereas in the Middle Ages, a huge amount of creativity went into adaptation.

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Translation, the moving, the repetition, the recreating of earlier texts, perhaps in other languages, perhaps not.

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But what a lot of this allows, which really is creativity, I think was the sort of worrying away at these questions.

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So when you read all the different versions of the Austrian legend, you see it's almost as though they run a series of thought experiments.

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OK, but what if what if Lancelot and Guinevere gave up their love?

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Could they then go to heaven? What if Arthur allowed them to love?

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How would that work? And in that sense, then you get a huge kind of cultural universe of thought about the most serious questions of life.

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And that question about secular love, earthly love is one of the most important and most serious.

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You can't dispense with it. It exists.

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It didn't have a very important role in society until the 12th century in the sense that what I mean is not much literature,

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certainly in England, nor much literature is about love before then.

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Love is not something that you do. It's something that happens to you that might distract you from the things you're supposed to be doing.

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Suddenly in the 12th century, they start experimenting with the idea that love is the point,

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that the reason you might be a great night will fight battles or fights in tournaments is to win the love of the lady.

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And there are lots of theories about why this might have happened right then.

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One is, quite frankly, that suddenly the church declared that marriage was only legitimate with clear, freely given consent of both parties.

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And all of a sudden there's a culture of love. And so you imagine the young women who are told, no, no, it's all about love, honestly.

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So the audience for chivalric romances, which are elevating the idea of love and knights fighting for their ladies,

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that audience is full of young men who don't have any land and who go to court and they fight

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and they try and get noticed and they try and get patronage and gifts from lords and so on.

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But what they ultimately want. Land and the way to get land is to marry an heiress, and so, of course, this literature,

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which is all about how you have to imagine the effect on the minds of,

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say, a 15 year old heiress, if she's constantly read stories about how knights will fight for her hand and long to win her love.

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And so you can see that even literature that seems profoundly fantastical or unreal is really deeply embedded in economic realities.

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Young men, they become knights because that's the way you make a living.

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If you're an aristocrat and you have no skills other than fighting and young heiresses need to be married off.

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So that's what literature is really about. But in that sense,

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the creativity involves a sort of a fascinating combination of really narrow eyed awareness of what's really going on

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with a willingness to explore in every sphere the implications of what's going on in their society and their culture.

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Chaucer himself references he did problematic that they might be to categorise as such.

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Oh, yeah, no problem. The also, of course, is that he's a genius. So he's not he's not symptomatic.

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He's emblematic of his age. He's not symptomatic of it. Is that why we should study him?

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We should study because he's a genius. I mean, there's no you couldn't not study him.

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His work is so intensely moving and enveloping.

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I mean, he is, of course, a creature of his age. So he does he adapts early attacks, he adapts genres.

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They're existing. He translates from French.

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It's often said that his decision to write in English was the shaping decision of English literature, although to be honest,

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I think that the emergence of English as the chief language for literary composition was just bound to happen at some point.

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It may as well have been him because it was everyone's mother tongue, you know, for hundreds of years now.

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If you had pretensions, you were speaking and writing in French or Latin, but you'd learnt them.

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You were thinking in English. So anyway, Chaucer, when he inherits the romance, he produces an absolute masterpiece,

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Troilus Countryside, which is the story of Troilus, Prince of Troy and his beloved Crosseyed.

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And they fall in love at the time of the siege of Troy. And then then, alas, she is sent to the Greek camp to rejoin her father,

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the traitor who abandoned Troy because he's a seer and he knows it's going to fall, at which point they're separated.

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And Troilus waits in agony for her to come back.

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And she, when she leaves, believes that she's going to come back. She says to me, Of course I'll come back.

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I'll be about ten days. And then once she's in the Greek camp, she thinks, hang on a minute, because she's a woman on her own in an enemy camp.

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And this is a very precisely female problem.

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If it were troilus in the Greek camp, he could fight his way out. And if he died in the process, that would be fine.

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But if she tries to escape the Greek camp, then she's not going to be killed very quickly.

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There's going to be a long, interim, unpleasant state.

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So she decides quite candidly that in fact, she will give up Troilus and will love Diomede, a Greek who is wooing her instead.

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And Troilus ultimately finally believes that she has abandoned him.

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And there's some astonishingly moving poetry in there when he says, I know that you've betrayed me, I know what's happened,

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but I cannot find it in me to unlove any quarter of a day cannot unlove you even a quarter of a day.

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It's unbearably moving. And then he fights on the plains of Troy every day and he's eventually slain by Achilles.

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But when he slain, my Achilles is taken up into the eighth sphere and he looks down on this little spot of earth

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and he laughs and he laughs at the people who are mourning his death and he sees eternity.

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And then Chaucer bursts out of this little pagan world and suddenly says low for pagans, cursed older eaters.

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Look at what this has got them. You know, they had nothing. They didn't have God.

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They didn't understand the truth. And now we see what all of this has been about.

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So Chaucer is been giving us for a start, the absolute forerunner of the novel.

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This is romance, which contains not just a person's individual journey, but it does contain that,

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nor a person's character development, but it does contain that, nor just history, but it contains that.

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What we really have fulfilled here is an individual and the course of their life in interaction with other individuals

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who are just as fully realised and the causes of their lives against the backdrop of a vast history and this history.

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Of course, the fall of Troy is the foundation history of Western Europe,

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and Chaucer succeeds in performing this trick whereby the foundation story of

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Western Europe is less important than the feelings of this woman as she thinks.

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Should I love him? Should I leave him? And so he manages to perform that flicker that we all know in our own lives that

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flicker between I am nothing in comparison with the vast sweep of history,

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and yet I am everything because I am all I know that flicker between emotion,

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which may as well be eternal because it feels more than you could bear to feel at this moment, but which is also fleeting and trivial.

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And then having established all of that and having felt it and dragged us through it for like five thousand lines,

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he then kicks Troilus out into eternity. And now we see that Troilus has been saved because he was a pagan.

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He didn't know about God. He lived before Christ, but he loved crusade with the devotion which is religious.

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And suddenly we see Troilus as a man with a total religious spirit.

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I mean, in a technical sense, and with nowhere to put his devotion, he only had an earthly woman to love, but.

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He loved her so unchanging only that he was rewarded with a sight of heaven,

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because had he lived in the time of Christ, then he would have understood his was a transcendent soul.

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And so choose his message to us, having brought us so movingly, so feelingly through this entire love affair is to us in the 14th century is.

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Well, aren't you lucky? You know a lot more than us.

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So we should rituals and not just for his acute psychological insight, but his ability to expand outwards and look at the bigger picture.

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Yes, absolutely. It's that combination that's astonishing.

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And also that awareness that the larger picture of human history or society is rising and falling, cultures rising and falling.

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All of that, of course, only actually has purchased in terms of individual experience.

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And that's something that earlier writers just don't really succeed in carrying someone like Geoffrey Thomas.

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He's incredibly influential. History of the Kings of Britain gave us the Syrian myth.

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Brutus meets Brutus coming from Troy, founding Europe, founding Britain, rather.

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But it just becomes an unending cycle of this king who is tyrannical and then was betrayed.

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And then this king who won a couple of battles and then was betrayed.

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And and so it's when a little bit later you start to get literature that can do both.

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That can give you a genuine sense of people, a sense of human agency, a sense of decision making,

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and then show those consequences spiralling out into the wider world because it does poke fun at romance romances in some of the Canterbury Tales.

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Absolutely. So Canterbury Tales, I mean, they're another matter entirely. I mean, he laughs at the given structures.

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I mean, obviously, see to us is hilarious spoof of a kind of popular romance that was clearly very popular in Charles's childhood.

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You know, it has a clip-clop rhythm. And as he went riding out one day, he saw this on and it was this sort of thing that's not a quote from Chaucer.

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But at the same time, he also quite movingly shows.

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So some of the characters in his Canterbury Tales who aren't themselves in romances have clearly been reading romances, the poor people.

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So then the Reeves tale, which is basically a nasty family where everyone gets their comeuppance and lots of horrible things happen.

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But at one point there's a Miller's daughter in it who we're told is very ugly.

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But as a result of various plotting, she's been having sex with one of the other characters all night.

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And when he leaves her in the morning, as he was always going to do, she says, Oh, Milliman, swear to my sweet darling,

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you know, I will always remember, she says, and it's entirely out of place in the fabric in this comic story.

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But what it does is you get this sudden sense of a whole character in this otherwise

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silly comic story and a whole character who's really been reading too many romances.

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And do you ever personally forget that you're reading something that's six, eight centuries old?

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Yes, constantly. I mean, apart from when the language is difficult and you think, what does that mean?

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But no, it's I mean, the kind of literary structures we live with now were invented then, you know,

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the idea that the goal of life is heterosexual love, which novels now periodically challenge and always applauded for challenging.

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Well, that was invented then. You know, it's all around us is quite hard to see.

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In fact, we tend to think of things as trans historical.

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But in fact, this is when they were invented and the ways in which they were invented really unpicks things that we now take for granted.

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So now everything feels to me new because it's as though it makes new things that are familiar from literature we read now.

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So you definitely encourage students, even though the language is hard to overcome that barrier.

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Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I have no problem with people.

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Well, not with Chaucer, which also you have to start with in Chaucer, in middle English, but with early.

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So, I mean, most of the stuff I work on is in French and Latin because following the Norman conquest,

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most writing for a couple of centuries was in French and Latin. And I got to it as a teenager through translation.

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At the moment I'm working on a book for Penguin Classics, which will contain excerpts of lots of the great works of this period,

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Tristan and Isolde and Altieri and stuff and so on, which will contain excerpts in translation with my introductions.

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And I'm hoping that a book like that, which anyone could pick up, anyone at school or just a member of the public,

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would actually encourage them to see that this stuff is not foreign and it's deeply fascinating.

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And then if you carry on studying this sort of thing as an undergraduate or graduate, then you start working with the original languages.

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But I just I just think people need to read the stuff in whatever form they can get hold of it.

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Thank you very much. Thank you.