I'm Dr. Laura Ashe and I teach Medieval Literature and Shakespeare at Worcester College Oxford and lecturer in the faculty,
and I work on the whole mediaeval period, but mostly from sort of late Anglo-Saxon up into the 14th century and Chaucer.
And at the moment, in fact, I'm writing a big book for the Oxford University Press,
which is going to be on the period from ten hundred thirteen fifty.
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.
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.
It comes after Beowulf and before Chaucer.
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.
But the reason that I'm completely fascinated with the period is that I think it's actually when someone has
important cultural changes happened and some of the most important literary developments and in particular,
I mean, what I've done a lot of work on is the romance. The romance really is the forerunner of the novel.
And I think it's in this period when the romance is invented,
what we really see is the invention of fiction, and that happens bang in the centre of my period.
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.
Originally, when authors started saying they were writing romances, they just meant they were writing in French rather than Latin Hollman in French.
But very rapidly these works started to develop a particular sort of character.
They were secular. They were about knights and ladies and adventures, and you'd follow an individual on his quest and so on.
This is the idea that we're still very familiar with because it's so popular at the moment.
In popular culture, there's a focus on love, which is typical, a focus on unreal events.
You know, often these knights fight giants or dragons or something.
But what is real is that the romance is highly concerned with ethical behaviour, with how one should approach the troubles of others,
with relations between men and women, with relations between kings and their servants or lords and their men.
And so that really an arena which in the Middle Ages was used to explore questions about how people ought to conduct their lives.
So romance is a code of behaviour.
So the code of behaviour mostly associated with romance is chivalry, but chivalry itself is a complete can of worms.
Just recently,
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.
So erm, we think of chivalry, I guess we think of holding doors open,
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,
the things that were essential to them were actually ethically valuable. And the reason that's important is because, of course,
Christianity fundamentally for centuries had been telling mediaeval aristocrats that
they were going to [INAUDIBLE] because in their daily lives they committed violence
and they had adulterous relationships and they indulged in conspicuous consumption
because you have to spend a lot of money and you have to fight and so on and so on.
And so this entire ruling class had known that they were going to [INAUDIBLE].
And then when in the 12th century, you get this sudden efflorescence of idealisation of the night life,
idealisation of courtly life, aristocratic life,
I think that serves a real fundamental social, cultural purpose for these people, that suddenly they're told your lives are not worthless.
It cannot be that God hates you because, look, the world loves you.
The sense that a secular ideal that could somehow stand against the daming ideals of Christianity
that say you should give away all your wealth and you should never commit violence. And so chivalry is nurtured in the romances.
It's developed there. It's explored there. And it's that that I think then becomes an interdependent.
The literature feeds life and the life feeds literature. Chivalry is quite problematic notion, isn't it, because it conflicts, as you say,
directly with the Christian ideals of turn the other cheek and love thy neighbour.
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.
So the sudden idea that if you were fighting for God, then you're fighting would be virtuous.
But of course, not all knights went on crusade all the time. So the real question was,
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?
And the answer was, I think for them, just a sense that we are copying the virtues of our ancestors.
The idea of a lot of romance was that it was displaced into the distant past.
And so there'd be this vision of then was a golden age.
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.
But the problem, the clash between chivalry and Christianity was never resolved.
I mean, this literature just couldn't resolve it. And you can see this when you think of the emergence, say, of the great.
And the Grail night, this is really a matter of automatic logic if you think that the idea of chivalry
is to become a better and better person than in mediaeval Christian Europe,
that can only mean getting closer to God. And so the ultimate quest rapidly becomes a Christian quest.
But then, of course, a Christian quest is completed by dying and being taken up to heaven.
And then we have the spectacle of the other nights, the ones who don't achieve Grail Quest being left at court, having failed.
And that really haunts the romance, this problem that it can't square the circle between Christian virtue and shimmering virtue.
So it's actually easy to see romance as a secular genre.
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.
There are only secular topics. You know this because it's not optional.
The ideals of Christianity are always there.
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.
But inasmuch as anything is secular in the Middle Ages, romance, certainly, particularly with the love of.
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.
I mean, the ideal of Tristan and Isolde is just a towering symbol of idealised love, which is worth dying for.
And this, of course, in itself is a highly secular ideal. To say that you should die for earthly love is dangerous.
And this played out in different ways, in different texts.
And often the claim was made that their earthly love was was ennobling, was was like a Christian love.
But that's not what the earliest text said.
And then the other famous couple, of course, Lancelot and Guinevere, and hear the desperate love triangle with King Arthur.
I mean, Tristan is in a love triangle with King Mark, but King Mark has never had quite the attraction of King Arthur.
And here it's interesting that it does either romances just tell episodes from that story and it's beautiful but fraught,
or when they bring it to its end.
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,
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.
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.
So secular love is quite subversive in this period. Is that quite indicative of the creativity of that evil period?
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.
I mean, we have an obsession with complete newness. The new something is if you've never seen it before, the better.
Whereas in the Middle Ages, a huge amount of creativity went into adaptation.
Translation, the moving, the repetition, the recreating of earlier texts, perhaps in other languages, perhaps not.
But what a lot of this allows, which really is creativity, I think was the sort of worrying away at these questions.
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.
OK, but what if what if Lancelot and Guinevere gave up their love?
Could they then go to heaven? What if Arthur allowed them to love?
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.
And that question about secular love, earthly love is one of the most important and most serious.
You can't dispense with it. It exists.
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,
certainly in England, nor much literature is about love before then.
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.
Suddenly in the 12th century, they start experimenting with the idea that love is the point,
that the reason you might be a great night will fight battles or fights in tournaments is to win the love of the lady.
And there are lots of theories about why this might have happened right then.
One is, quite frankly, that suddenly the church declared that marriage was only legitimate with clear, freely given consent of both parties.
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.
So the audience for chivalric romances, which are elevating the idea of love and knights fighting for their ladies,
that audience is full of young men who don't have any land and who go to court and they fight
and they try and get noticed and they try and get patronage and gifts from lords and so on.
But what they ultimately want. Land and the way to get land is to marry an heiress, and so, of course, this literature,
which is all about how you have to imagine the effect on the minds of,
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.
And so you can see that even literature that seems profoundly fantastical or unreal is really deeply embedded in economic realities.
Young men, they become knights because that's the way you make a living.
If you're an aristocrat and you have no skills other than fighting and young heiresses need to be married off.
So that's what literature is really about. But in that sense,
the creativity involves a sort of a fascinating combination of really narrow eyed awareness of what's really going on
with a willingness to explore in every sphere the implications of what's going on in their society and their culture.
Chaucer himself references he did problematic that they might be to categorise as such.
Oh, yeah, no problem. The also, of course, is that he's a genius. So he's not he's not symptomatic.
He's emblematic of his age. He's not symptomatic of it. Is that why we should study him?
We should study because he's a genius. I mean, there's no you couldn't not study him.
His work is so intensely moving and enveloping.
I mean, he is, of course, a creature of his age. So he does he adapts early attacks, he adapts genres.
They're existing. He translates from French.
It's often said that his decision to write in English was the shaping decision of English literature, although to be honest,
I think that the emergence of English as the chief language for literary composition was just bound to happen at some point.
It may as well have been him because it was everyone's mother tongue, you know, for hundreds of years now.
If you had pretensions, you were speaking and writing in French or Latin, but you'd learnt them.
You were thinking in English. So anyway, Chaucer, when he inherits the romance, he produces an absolute masterpiece,
Troilus Countryside, which is the story of Troilus, Prince of Troy and his beloved Crosseyed.
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,
the traitor who abandoned Troy because he's a seer and he knows it's going to fall, at which point they're separated.
And Troilus waits in agony for her to come back.
And she, when she leaves, believes that she's going to come back. She says to me, Of course I'll come back.
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.
And this is a very precisely female problem.
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.
But if she tries to escape the Greek camp, then she's not going to be killed very quickly.
There's going to be a long, interim, unpleasant state.
So she decides quite candidly that in fact, she will give up Troilus and will love Diomede, a Greek who is wooing her instead.
And Troilus ultimately finally believes that she has abandoned him.
And there's some astonishingly moving poetry in there when he says, I know that you've betrayed me, I know what's happened,
but I cannot find it in me to unlove any quarter of a day cannot unlove you even a quarter of a day.
It's unbearably moving. And then he fights on the plains of Troy every day and he's eventually slain by Achilles.
But when he slain, my Achilles is taken up into the eighth sphere and he looks down on this little spot of earth
and he laughs and he laughs at the people who are mourning his death and he sees eternity.
And then Chaucer bursts out of this little pagan world and suddenly says low for pagans, cursed older eaters.
Look at what this has got them. You know, they had nothing. They didn't have God.
They didn't understand the truth. And now we see what all of this has been about.
So Chaucer is been giving us for a start, the absolute forerunner of the novel.
This is romance, which contains not just a person's individual journey, but it does contain that,
nor a person's character development, but it does contain that, nor just history, but it contains that.
What we really have fulfilled here is an individual and the course of their life in interaction with other individuals
who are just as fully realised and the causes of their lives against the backdrop of a vast history and this history.
Of course, the fall of Troy is the foundation history of Western Europe,
and Chaucer succeeds in performing this trick whereby the foundation story of
Western Europe is less important than the feelings of this woman as she thinks.
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
flicker between I am nothing in comparison with the vast sweep of history,
and yet I am everything because I am all I know that flicker between emotion,
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.
And then having established all of that and having felt it and dragged us through it for like five thousand lines,
he then kicks Troilus out into eternity. And now we see that Troilus has been saved because he was a pagan.
He didn't know about God. He lived before Christ, but he loved crusade with the devotion which is religious.
And suddenly we see Troilus as a man with a total religious spirit.
I mean, in a technical sense, and with nowhere to put his devotion, he only had an earthly woman to love, but.
He loved her so unchanging only that he was rewarded with a sight of heaven,
because had he lived in the time of Christ, then he would have understood his was a transcendent soul.
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.
Well, aren't you lucky? You know a lot more than us.
So we should rituals and not just for his acute psychological insight, but his ability to expand outwards and look at the bigger picture.
Yes, absolutely. It's that combination that's astonishing.
And also that awareness that the larger picture of human history or society is rising and falling, cultures rising and falling.
All of that, of course, only actually has purchased in terms of individual experience.
And that's something that earlier writers just don't really succeed in carrying someone like Geoffrey Thomas.
He's incredibly influential. History of the Kings of Britain gave us the Syrian myth.
Brutus meets Brutus coming from Troy, founding Europe, founding Britain, rather.
But it just becomes an unending cycle of this king who is tyrannical and then was betrayed.
And then this king who won a couple of battles and then was betrayed.
And and so it's when a little bit later you start to get literature that can do both.
That can give you a genuine sense of people, a sense of human agency, a sense of decision making,
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.
Absolutely. So Canterbury Tales, I mean, they're another matter entirely. I mean, he laughs at the given structures.
I mean, obviously, see to us is hilarious spoof of a kind of popular romance that was clearly very popular in Charles's childhood.
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.
But at the same time, he also quite movingly shows.
So some of the characters in his Canterbury Tales who aren't themselves in romances have clearly been reading romances, the poor people.
So then the Reeves tale, which is basically a nasty family where everyone gets their comeuppance and lots of horrible things happen.
But at one point there's a Miller's daughter in it who we're told is very ugly.
But as a result of various plotting, she's been having sex with one of the other characters all night.
And when he leaves her in the morning, as he was always going to do, she says, Oh, Milliman, swear to my sweet darling,
you know, I will always remember, she says, and it's entirely out of place in the fabric in this comic story.
But what it does is you get this sudden sense of a whole character in this otherwise
silly comic story and a whole character who's really been reading too many romances.
And do you ever personally forget that you're reading something that's six, eight centuries old?
Yes, constantly. I mean, apart from when the language is difficult and you think, what does that mean?
But no, it's I mean, the kind of literary structures we live with now were invented then, you know,
the idea that the goal of life is heterosexual love, which novels now periodically challenge and always applauded for challenging.
Well, that was invented then. You know, it's all around us is quite hard to see.
In fact, we tend to think of things as trans historical.
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.
So now everything feels to me new because it's as though it makes new things that are familiar from literature we read now.
So you definitely encourage students, even though the language is hard to overcome that barrier.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I have no problem with people.
Well, not with Chaucer, which also you have to start with in Chaucer, in middle English, but with early.
So, I mean, most of the stuff I work on is in French and Latin because following the Norman conquest,
most writing for a couple of centuries was in French and Latin. And I got to it as a teenager through translation.
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,
Tristan and Isolde and Altieri and stuff and so on, which will contain excerpts in translation with my introductions.
And I'm hoping that a book like that, which anyone could pick up, anyone at school or just a member of the public,
would actually encourage them to see that this stuff is not foreign and it's deeply fascinating.
And then if you carry on studying this sort of thing as an undergraduate or graduate, then you start working with the original languages.
But I just I just think people need to read the stuff in whatever form they can get hold of it.
Thank you very much. Thank you.