Introduction: Genre as Form-of-Life

Abstract

This introductory essay argues for the importance of reevaluating the genres and genre theories of medieval England. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s notion of “form-of-life,” based on monastic liturgical practice, the essay considers how early writing represents genre as intrinsically linked with experience and practice, and it demonstrates how genre is always implicit in medieval textual practices. As form-of-life, genre binds texts to experience, not as prescriptive “law” but as a structure for living. In medieval genres and kinds, taxonomies, prescriptions, and conventions take shape within a lifeworld of text and practice. And, for this reason, early genre and genre theory resist or complicate some of the binaries on which later genre theory sometimes relies: the instrumental and the aesthetic, the innovative and the conventional, the pure form and the hybrid, the read and the performed.

Keywords:

• genre theory
• genre
• form-of-life
• Agamben
• Piers Plowman
• vernacular literary theory
• medieval genre

In the long history of theorizing genre, medieval writing has often been treated as an exception, a disruption, or a discontinuity. As Benedetto Croce put it in 1902, “The Italian Renaissance critics, while working at their Poetics in the style of Aristotle, found themselves confronted with chivalric poetry, and had to make the best of it” (440). The hybridity and mutability of medieval genres have long challenged modern genre theories based on taxonomy, from the neoclassicism of Renaissance poetics to Kant’s a priori aesthetics. But if this disjunction suggests that genres are historic and contingent, genre theory, too, changes in response to diachronic cultural shifts. Croce’s own rejection of the “scientific” abstraction of genre in favor of an “aesthetic” practice of contemplation of the particular work is built on a history of genre theory that demonstrates that an oscillation between embrace and rejection of generic laws characterizes the field (32–38; 449–58). The recent reassessments of genre theory across diverse periods and media, then, can be understood as responses to the taxonomic synchronism of mid-century genre theory epitomized in the work of Northrop Frye. In particular, a resurgence of interest in Jacques Derrida’s claim that the normative force of the law of genre contains its own disruption has led to explorations of the hybridity, contingency, and exception central to all genre theory.¹ Perhaps because of its long history as an exception to modern genre theory, medieval literature has inspired a body of criticism that emphasizes the social and practical aspects of genre, taking into account what Fredric Jameson called “the radical discontinuity of modes of production and of their cultural expressions” (130). The critic Hans Robert Jauss’s concept of medieval genre as an audience’s “horizon of expectations” (76–109) inaugurated a small but incisive body of criticism that examines how genre creates and is created by social structures, use-contexts, and use-value.²

Thus, in response to post-structuralist critiques of the “law” of genre, this special issue suggests thinking instead of the “rule” of genre. In Derrida’s analysis, “law” stands above and apart from practice, not an “imperative constraint” but rather a “discourse” that “operates at the limit” between the subject’s actual freedom to act and his self-subjection before the prohibitive law (“Before the Law” 199–204). In his discussion of Benedictine monastic life, Giorgio Agamben offers the concept of the “rule” as an alternative to “law.” Unlike the juridical structure of “law” that governs modern life under a sovereign power, the liturgical structure of the “common life” (koinos bios, from which the term “cenoby” derives) is a rule: “[a] norm that does not refer to single acts and events, but to the entire existence of an individual” (Highest Poverty 26). Guided by the liturgy, rule and life converge in monastic practice to create what Agamben names “form-of-life” (forma vitae), borrowing a term from Wittgenstein (Highest Poverty xii). Form-of-life suggests that life is practiced, interpreted, and navigated through forms, and thus that rules or norms are co-constitutive with lived experience. Form-of-life further retains the potentiality of all human life, regardless of subject position within legal or juridical structures:

A life that cannot be separated from its form is a life for which what is at stake in its way of living is living itself. What does this formulation mean? It defines a life — human life — in which the single ways, acts, and processes of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life. (Agamben, Means 4, emphasis in original)

When life merges with rule, it escapes being only the object of law. Inherently premodern in its conception, form-of-life offers resistance to modern forms of political oppression by joining theory and practice, text and lived experience. Form-of-life promises a life “which is never given as property but only as a common use” (Highest Poverty xiii).

The textual manifestations of form-of-life may be nowhere clearer than in premodern writing, particularly, as the essays in this special issue demonstrate, in the multilingual and transcultural texts of medieval England. In the performance of medieval liturgy and monastic rules, as Agamben explores, “writing and life, being and living become properly indiscernible in the form of a total liturgization of life and a vivification of liturgy that is just as entire” (Highest Poverty 82). Likewise, in medieval hagiography, a saint’s lived experience and the written account of it are often interchangeable, linked semantically where the saint’s vita is both the form and the content, both something written and something lived. Secular genres, too, bind form and life. As many of the contributors to this volume demonstrate, genres as various as proverbs (Bradbury), encyclopedias (Steiner), and conduct literature (Jahner) not only reflect the lived experience of their readers but aim to shape it. For instance, while the fürstenspiegel, as Matthew Giancarlo explores, mirrors what it seeks to produce (the well-ordered sovereign), the medieval romances that Jane Gilbert examines invite ways of reading that simultaneously engage generic issues and existential and ethical stances. Several essays here (Chaganti, Johnson) take up how genres acquire a life of their own in performance, suggesting the extent to which, as Ardis Butterfield has shown elsewhere, genres like lyric might have a “living form,” with “a whole realm of existence off the page, off the record, as a free-floating assemblage of memorial elements with the capacity to find temporary formal realization on the page” (“Construction” 57). Thus, as many of the essays in this special issue begin to suggest, in premodern texts lived experience and written form are mutually constitutive.

Still, to claim that medieval texts operate as formae vitae, that they link form and life, is not yet to explain how genre emerges from this intersection. On the one hand, premodern literature and literary theory suggest that identifying what a genre does, as a distinct manifestation of form-of-life, is more important than pinning down what a genre is. On the other, however rarely medieval texts speak of genre qua genre, they evince clear awareness of generic conventions, forms, and taxonomies, even as they depict genre as fundamentally dynamic, performative, and participatory. Shifting our understanding of medieval genre from “law” to “rule” offers a model for the particularly practical flavor of medieval generic thinking. The porous boundary between text and life manifests as genre, for while not all utterances are form-of-life, medieval textual kinds act as rules in precisely the Agambenian sense, giving shape to practice which must nonetheless be enacted to become form-of-life. The models of genre presented by our contributors imply less Derridean disruption than continuity or negotiation between practice and norm. As this special issue seeks to demonstrate, it is precisely because medieval texts so often make transparent their performance- and use-contexts and explicitly engage the dialectic between form and life that they may be especially instructive for theorizations of genre in later periods. Medieval texts were meant, above all, to be used: for entertainment, edification, and/or practical knowledge. Recalling Christopher Cannon’s memorable formulation, “form is that which thought and things have in common,” we might say, genre is what thought and life — as experience, as practice — have in common (5). Genre, both in its theory and instantiation, is thus always bound up with what media theorists call the “lifeworld,” the temporal, spatial, and even virtual spheres of lived experience (Ihde 3–15).

Take, for example, a medieval poem whose proliferation of genres and production of lifeworlds is central to its exploration of the relationship between rule and life: William Langland’s Piers Plowman, a work acknowledged both as a “self-conscious genre performance” (Middleton 119) and as marked by “shifting generic commitments” (Justice 292). Indebted to scholastic learning, courtly and devotional genres, and the liturgy, the poem situates this varied generic “makynge” firmly within the frame of form-of-life; it both engages and seeks to create lifeworlds. In particular, the latter passus of the poem (sometimes called the vita by early scribes) follow the dreamer, Will, as he seeks to apprehend and define three forms of living: Dowel, Dobet, and Dobest. As Emily Steiner notes, this triad “encapsulates this relationship between being and doing … [and holds] forth the possibility of an ideal form that correlates moral and literary practice” (141). To be sure, the concurrence of form and practice is a driving concern of the central dreams of the poem, teased out as Will struggles to understand the relation of form and life, the literary and the experiential. In the opening lines of Passus XII of the B-text, Ymaginatif cautions Will about the spiritual futility of literary production: “And thow medlest thee with makynges — and myghtest go seye thi Sauter, / And bidde for hem that yyveth thee bred, for ther are bokes ynow / To telle men what Dowel is, Dobet and Dobest bothe” (XII.16–18). The making of books, Ymaginatif argues, is not as efficacious as is the practice of prayer. In a discussion of such articulations of anxiety about “makyng” in Piers Plowman, Anne Middleton argues that these moments constitute “a remarkably consistent, if implicit, definition of genre, which subjects the poem to literary, rather than directly instrumental, standards of social and spiritual value” (111). Yet, such a distinction between the practical and the literary need not be absolute.

Indeed, as the following passus makes clear, it is precisely in the conjunction of the instrumental and the literary, in Conscience’s textual feast, that genre emerges as rule, giving form to practice. Although we should certainly read this episode’s feast of texts as a meditation on Matthew 4.4, “Man shall not live by bread alone, but by every word that proceedeth out of the mouth of God,” its opening references to Conscience’s court and courteous hospitality (XIII.31) also evoke the feasts of medieval romance, and the episode’s increasingly explicit descriptions of eating and digestion contribute to the passage’s anticlerical satire. This passage invites its readers into the multiplicities of the poem’s generic practice as it situates ingestion within these contexts. The “Maister” who attends the feast “lowe louted and loveliche to Scripture,” a courteous gesture. The dishes themselves at once suggest generic variety and the social hierarchy of romance. The “metes” served are appropriate to those who will consume them: those at the high table eat “sondry metes manye— / of Austyn, of Ambrose, of alle the foure Evangelistes” (XIII.37–38); the Master devours delicacies fit for the courtly table, including “manye sondry metes, mortrewes and puddynges, / Wombe cloutes, and wilde brawen, and egges [with grece yfryed]” (XIII.62–63). Patience and Will, seated apart at a side table, consume the “soure lof” of the penitential psalms; yet Patience declares, “Here is propre service … Ther fareth no prince bettre” (XIII.51). Satirical in the context of romance, Patience’s statement is sincere when the feast is read as an allegory for textual meditation. Anticlerical satire becomes more prominent as Will derides the Master as “Goddes gloton … with hise grete chekes” (XIII.78).

It is precisely the way in which this scene of textual consumption demands generic dexterity on the part of the reader that illustrates how genre gives form to practice. While metaphors of textual consumption are a commonplace of both revelatory writing and medieval lectio, in the context of Will’s search for Dowel, the scene’s focus on the penitential psalms throws into relief the integration of form and experience central to much premodern writing: to be the recipient of texts is to consume them, be transformed by them, and ultimately to embody or live them. Insofar as the scene is an assemblage of texts in use – gospels, psalms, and theological treatises – it reproduces, in miniature, the generic engagements of the poem as a whole. Further, Langland’s use of plural generic contexts of feasting makes textual practice socially (in the romance and satiric contexts) and spiritually (in the penitential and allegorical contexts) meaningful.

The hybridity of this episode suggests that genre emerges at the intersection of text and practice, which becomes apparent if we trace the development of a single genre, the penitential psalms, in the scene. With his opening injunction, “Agite penitenciam” (XIII.48; Do penance; Matthew 3.2), Conscience prods Patience and Will to action and offers a generic frame for the texts that follow. Never explicitly identified as penitential psalms here, their genre manifests in their affective impact: they are what they make happen. When ingested, these texts, Conscience implies, are life-giving and are to be incorporated “as lif and lycame may dure” (XIII.50). There is a productive circularity and recursivity here: in the poem’s reformulation of Psalm 31.1–2, “Beati quarum” has been made by “Beatus virres.” Blessedness produced blessedness. Less important are the dreamer’s “horizon of expectations” of the types of texts he will be consuming (pace Jauss) than what they effect in him. “[T]he very recitation of the psalms,” Annie Sutherland reminds us, “is an effective performance of penance” (19). In this sense, we might say, the penitential psalms exemplify how genres functioned as form-of-life for their medieval producers and audiences. Or, to put it another way, the penitential psalms suggest the ways in which the conditions of genre are bound up with the genre’s effects. As Curtis Jirsa notes, this scene “defines a process of directing our gaze inwards with the words we incorporate, transforming the ‘clergie’ into a ‘kynde knowing’ that moves us to ethical behavior and, potentially, proper poetic production” (103). In short, Piers Plowman engages the penitential psalms in this scene as a distinctively performative type of biblical text, in which doing and saying, life and form constitute a single practice.

Whereas Langland’s poem exemplifies the dynamic, recombinative, and active qualities of generic assemblage, Richard Rolle theorizes genre more explicitly in his prologue to the English Psalter. Here, he emphasizes the productivity of the recitation of psalms, which effect interior change, kindling “thaire willes with the fyre of luf, makand thaim hate and brennand withinen” (Bramley 3).³ The psalms can do this, in part, because of their generic range. As Rolle notes, the book “conteyns all that other bokes draghes langly: that is, the lare of the ald testament & of the new. Thare in is discryued the medes of goed men, the pynes of ill men, the disciplyne of penaunce, the waxynge in rightwise lif, the perfeccioun of haly men” and so on (Bramley 4). For Rolle as for many medieval commentators, the psalms are a compendium of forms, actions, and affect, offering a microcosm of the content and forms of both Hebrew and Christian scriptures. Further, Rolle defines the genre of the psalms (his “boke of ympnes”) in wholly experiential, affective, and performative terms: “ympne is lovynge of God with sange. Til an ympne falles thre thynges: louynge of God; ioiynge of hert or thoght; affectuouse thynkynge of Goddis luf. Sange is a gret gladnes of thoght of lastand thynge and endles ioy, brestand in voice of lovynge” (Bramley 4). Strikingly, for Rolle, hymns or psalms are as much modes of being as they are written forms. Likewise, although in Piers Plowman, the consumption of the psalms ultimately enables Will’s “move from books to life,” the feast of penitential texts that precedes that movement teaches another lesson: that texts and life are bound up with each other (Lawlor, “Conscience’s Dinner” 91). Texts, especially performative texts like the penitential psalms, both give form to life and enliven form. And, indeed, as the essays in this special issue suggest, if we are to understand medieval approaches to genre, we might best begin with the texts themselves, noting what they suggest about what genres do, how they embody “a variety of social practices” (Butterfield, “Medieval Genres” 189) and both give shape to and produce experience. To attend to the genre thinking generated by medieval texts is to resist what Nicolette Zeeman has called the “critical prioritization of the explicit” (226) in favor of examining genres as they emerge in practice.

This is not to say, as has sometimes been suggested, that the Middle Ages lacked explicit or coherent theories of genre or that “awareness of genre was in abeyance during the Middle Ages” (Fowler 142). Rather, our inability to find “genre theory” in the Middle Ages may lie in our own post-medieval generic expectations of what genre theory should look like. Medieval theories of genre themselves, as set forth in rhetorical treatises, often represent genre as form-of-life. While the three branches of rhetoric — the artes poeticae, artes praedicandi, and artes dictaminis — imply a set of general generic distinctions — poetry, sermons, prose, or letters — and manuals on these subjects sometimes speak of the forma or modus tractatus (the form of the treatise, or its structure) and forma tractandi (the form of treatment, or its style), such manuals rarely speak of “genus” or “species” in a way that translates easily to our modern ideas about literary kinds. Certainly, such manuals are often more prescriptive than theoretical, focusing on instruction in the formal intricacies of rhetorical figures; for this reason, it has frequently been assumed that their primary interest, as A. C. Spearing writes, “is in literary style, and in style conceived of purely as a matter of local verbal arrangement” (49). Yet while medieval rhetorical manuals sometimes represent genre as an ordering of parts (as Geoffrey of Vinsauf explains, literary inventio might be understood as analogous to the building of a house, 16–17), the structure’s final form is the assemblage of a range of materials. Medieval genre is fundamentally recombinative, but this assemblage is never only formal or stylistic. Rather, it is often responsive to and generative of cultural practice or affect.

While Latinate treatises may emphasize rhetorical forms over genre, they sometimes define genre by associating these forms with their conditions and affective impact, like their vernacular counterparts.⁴ For instance, rhetorical decorum binds language to a state of life or class. As John of Garland’s PoetriaParisiana suggests: “Pastorali uite conuenit stilus humilis, agricolis mediocris, grauis grauibus personis, que present pastoribus et agricolis” (87; The low style suits the pastoral life; the middle style, farmers; the high style, eminent personages who are set over shepherds and farmers).⁵ Further, these treatises’ associations of literary mode (modus) with practice, action, affect, and performance suggest the extent to which genre and modes were seen as giving form to experience and affect.⁶ As with Richard Rolle’s association of “ympnes” with the production of affect, other treatises, such as the Occitan thirteenth-century Doctrina de compondre dictas, bind generic identity with cause and emotion: “Lays es appellat per ço lays que·s deu far ab gran contriccio e ab gran moviment de cor vers Deu o vers aycellas causas de volrras parlar” (Marshall 97; The genre lay is called that because it must be composed with great contrition and great movement of your heart towards God or towards those things of which you would speak). Defining the genre of complaint, Chaucer’s Complaint of Mars suggests a similar linkage of form, affect, and cause: “The order of compleynt requireth skylfully / That yf a wight shal pleyne pitously, / Ther mot be cause wherefore that men pleyne” (155–57).

Most engagements with literary genre in vernacular texts in late-medieval Europe, however, do not provide such explicit discussions. Rather, as many of our contributors show, early genre thinking is often manifested implicitly in the structure, style, affiliations, and uses of vernacular texts. Even vernacular prologues, those rich repositories of literary theory that often translate rhetorical and learning into the vernacular, frequently speak only obliquely to the following work’s generic commitments.⁷ Although much of the work on the prologues of vernacular texts has focused largely on their representation of translation and the formation of vernacular literary authority, they also might give us a sense of how vernacular writing understood genre, as Rolle’s introductory comments about what an “ympne” is suggest. Many of these prologues suggest how genre emerges in practice and reception, emphasizing the connection of form and life. For example, in the prologue to his mid-fifteenth-century Legendys of Hooly Wummen, Osbern Bokenham reflects on the forma tractandi and forma tractatus, suggesting that the beginning of any work should explain both the “what” and the “why” of the text that follows.⁸ Three things, he explains “longyn to ‘what’: / Auctor, matere, and forme ordinat” (19–20). Yet, in explaining his “form of procedyng,” Bokenham explicitly rejects the techniques advocated by rhetorical treatises, saying that his approach to his “matere” is rudely written, but that it “pleynly declaryth hyr legend, / As they shul heryn wych lyst attende” (81–82). Instead of following “[t]he forme of procedyng artificial … After the scole of the crafty clerk / Galfryd of ynglond,” Bokenham is more interested in how the translation might “excite / Mennys affeccyoun” than model the “crafty werk” of poetic embellishment (83, 85–86, 98, 128). The genre of “lyf” or “legende” is known here less by its form or content than by the conditions of its production (Bokenham’s religious devotion and desire to please his patron) and in its expected effect (the excitation of the affections).

As this and other vernacular texts make clear, and as many essays in this special issue explore, it is impossible to separate ideas about genre in the Middle Ages from experience, performance, and reception. Further, to speak of reception is not simply to think about what medieval readers brought to a text, or to speak solely of Jaussian “horizons of expectation.” Rather, as we saw in the textual consumption at Conscience’s dinner, genres are often defined by their effects, by the affect, experience, or lifeworlds they generate. Attending to affective and cognitive response may well, as Eleanor Johnson’s essay here suggests, open up new ways of approaching genre more generally insofar as “new and productive groupings of medieval texts emerge when we understand genre as a form defined by its will to produce certain states of mind and affect.” Thus, even as medieval genre theory develops and exemplifies certain generic taxonomies and prescriptions, it moves beyond them, emphasizing the relationship between text, context, and audience. Genre is what is generated in the practice of these forms, both in composition and in reception.

If many medieval treatises implicitly define genre as form-of-life, by imagining texts as emerging from the mutual influence of theory and practice, intimations of the taxonomic approach that characterized post-medieval genre theory also began to appear in the late Middle Ages. By the fifteenth century, French “Arts of the Second Rhetoric,” such as Deschamps’ L’art de dictier, sought both to define and model major genres and forms (Minnis and Johnson 455; Hiatt 279). Although this turn to generic taxonomies marks a slight departure from earlier approaches to genre, it also establishes the grounds on which genres could be defined as purely aesthetic or formal, distanced from experience and performance, and treated as static rather than dynamic forms. A fully taxonomic system emerges with the neoclassical treatises of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as genre itself becomes “an organizing principle and a primary preoccupation in many Renaissance discussions of poetics” (Dubrow 58). Sir Philip Sidney’s Defence of Poesy, for example, identifies eight “notable” poetic genres: heroic, lyric, tragic, comic, satiric, iambic, elegiac, and pastoral (218, 229–32). Post-Enlightenment models of aesthetics that encouraged the contemplation of the autonomous aesthetic object energized a more streamlined theory of genres. Following the influential aesthetic critiques of philosophers such as Hegel, literary genres were codified into three kinds: lyric, epic, and drama.

But while post-medieval genre theory has often emphasized the abstract laws of taxonomy, we suggest that the articulation of these laws has implicitly grappled with genre as form-of-life. Many of these theories are constructed around the intersection between textual kinds and the lifeworld, especially its temporal, spatial, and “virtual” dimensions. Consider, for instance, the common metaphor of genre as “institution” which exists, as René Wellek and Austin Warren put it,

not as an animal exists or even as a building, chapel, library, or capitol, but as an institution exists. One can work through, express oneself through, existing institutions, create new ones, or get on, so far as possible, without sharing in politics or rituals; one can also join, but then reshape, institutions. (226)

The elaboration of this metaphor reminds us that institutions tend to occupy a physical space (“building, chapel, library, or capitol”) and change over time (“reshape[d]” by their members) even as the metaphor implies a certain degree of transhistorical stability.⁹

As the “institution” metaphor suggests, the emergence of modern genre theory is bound up with historiography. For Hegel and his contemporaries, the three genres of epic, lyric, and dramatic poetry developed in different epochs.¹⁰ Epic poetry flourishes under what Hegel calls “heroic” historical conditions, characterized by familial and communal relational structures that are not yet nationalistic (2.1051–53). Lyric poetry requires “a more or less completed organization of human relationships, because only in those times has the individual person become self-reflective in contrast to the external world,” and dramatic poetry requires the emergence of “the principle of free individuality” for its dialectic between inner consciousness and external reality (2.1123; 2.1206). But all three kinds of poetry evolve through what Hegel identifies as the three aesthetic eras, the symbolic, classical, and romantic, which roughly correspond to pre-Hellenic or “primitive” history, Greek and Roman Empire, and modernity. Northrop Frye identifies four “mythoi” that structure literary works: comedy, tragedy, romance, and satire, which correlate to the temporal phenomena of the seasons. These mythoi have generic force, as witnessed in the work of historian Hayden White, who used them to describe the form of historical narratives. In White’s taxonomy, nineteenth-century historians and philosophers drew on these four types in their “emplotments” of European history. As with the metaphor of genre as “institution,” the seemingly synchronic mythoi (whose analogy to the seasons suggests recurrence) have diachronic force, giving pattern to historical change.

Critiques of these broad, macrological schema have approached, without articulating, an idea of genre as form-of-life, by focusing on the local and micrological nature of genres. Fredric Jameson’s dialectical critique of Frye centers on genre’s complex temporality, with genre offering a “mediatory function” between the “immanent formal analysis of the individual text” and the “twin diachronic perspective of the history of forms and the evolution of social life” (105). Equally important to genre in the literary structure of a text are its “modes” of utterance, locally embedded forms of language that invoke or distill genres into their common stylistics. These modes appear to be synchronic, persisting even as the institutions that created the larger generic categories disintegrate, but in fact they, too, undergo historical change (Fowler 106–29). Bakhtin saw such historical changes in rhetoric as inseparable from the generic change of what he called “speech genres,” encompassing all forms of oral and written language use (65–66). As genre study broadens beyond the conventionally “literary” text, some of the theory most attentive to localized practice occurs in rhetoric and media studies. Rhetorical readings of genre understand it as a kind of “social action,” bearing both its own ideologies as well as potential for social change (Miller; Coe et. al.). Film history shows that a constant negotiation between localized subgenres (the “railway picture,” the “headline picture”) and broader kinds (the “Western,” the “biopic”) structures the two modes of determining genre that Rick Altman calls the “critic’s game” and the “producer’s game.” Where critics define genre as a back-formation from the fully determined specimen, taking, for instance, a paradigmatic “Western” and building a history for it by mining filmography, producers engage in a recursive feedback-loop of box office success, modifying the microgeneric features of recently successful films until the amalgamation coalesces into a critically coherent genre (Altman).

While the temporal dimension of the lifeworld has driven the development of post-Enlightenment genre theory, space has been less central to its conception. Hegel dismisses the importance of geographical space to the epic genre:

[N]ationality implies possession of a geographic home; but if its geography does not give its people a specific character, then provided that a remote and different natural environment [as an epic setting] does not contradict the nation’s own special character, it may not be disturbing at all and may have something special for the imagination. (2.1056–57)

The spatial properties of the material text provide, for Croce, the only good use for genre: arranging books on library shelves (38). Yet spatial metaphors have gained increased use in genre theory, from Jauss’ “horizon of expectations” to the idea of generic “borders” (that can be illicitly “crossed”). Mobility and scale, implied in the latter metaphor, lead to the concept of a genre “map” traversed by recursive or illicit itineraries. Its relational networks offer shifting scales that can be represented by fractal geometry, which preserves generic “texture” by accommodating tiny and vast genres (Dimock, Through Other Continents 73–106; Dimock and Robbins, “Remapping Genre”). In this collection, Emily Steiner and Nancy Bradbury deal with the dialectic of generic scale: respectively, how the “compendious” genre, in which vastness of size necessitates and creates generic structure, is drawn toward the concision of lyric, and how the “microgenre” of the proverb embeds itself in and lends coherence to larger generic structures.

The lifeworld also contains virtual spaces, whose protean geometries offer new models for generic thinking. These include a model of genre as windows-based desktop, in which a “user” (reader/author) can “switch,” “stack,” or “scale” genres at will (Dimock, “Migration”), the retrieval-oriented database as a genre (Folsom), or the absent space left by ghosts in the genre machine, as Seeta Chaganti’s essay in this issue demonstrates. As form-of-life, genre is at once virtual and phenomenal, offering modes of living through texts that “are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life” — or of texts (Agamben, Means 4, emphasis in original). Jane Gilbert’s description, in her essay in this issue, of the “open” and “closed” modes of reading the gestes d’Alexandre, also suggests the way in which genre creates this kind of a virtual space of potentiality.

Thinking of medieval genres as form-of-life, then, both illuminates and develops the temporality, spatiality, and virtuality central to modern genre theory, and reveals the importance of a study of medieval genre to post-medieval genres and genre theory. The diverse group of essays in this special double issue takes up both literary and “practical” genres in order to explore the interpenetration of text and life in medieval English culture, focusing especially on the ways in which generic structures give form to local, mutable, and contingent practices. The issue opens with essays treating “practical” genres. In her readings of medieval conduct literature, Jennifer Jahner notes that “[t]he didactic … marks the basic problem case in genre theory,” which tends to privilege the innovative and aesthetic over the instrumental. Studying especially the texts and format of San Marino, Huntington Library, MS HM 144, a fifteenth-century miscellany containing prescriptive texts such as William Litchfield’s Complaint between Man and God, and Chaucer’s Tale of Melibee, Jahner demonstrates the acquisitive logic of the conduct literature genre and its compilation, as well as the potentiality that inheres both in this genre and in the concept of genre itself. Also discussing practical literature as a model of genre theory, Matthew Giancarlo shows how English instances of the “mirror for princes” (or fürstenspiegel) genre — especially Hoccleve’s Regement of Princes and Fortescue’s De laudibus legum Anglie — enact a process of recombinant genre-formation. As their genre dictates, these texts at once prescribe right living and demand interpretive practice of their precepts. “In this … generic setting,” Giancarlo explains, “political praxis can be recursive in a way directly analogous to the self-authorizing recursivity of interpretation itself, a sort of hermeneutic circle of ‘right’ reading that fulfills prior genre-assumptions about what constitutes a proper exercise of authority, and about how those principles are discursively framed.”

Other essays in this special issue take up the relations of space and scale to genre thinking, looking at how formal compression or accretion give shape to and generate lifeworlds. Nancy Mason Bradbury considers how the didactic and the literary interact in her essay on proverbs as a “microgenre” in Chaucer’s poetry and in the Middle English Dialogue of Solomon and Marcolf. Resisting the common metaphor of generic “mixing,” she proposes a model of “embedding” genres within one another in a way that allows their boundaries to remain distinct and yet porous. Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s late essay, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” which expands the theorist’s earlier concept of literary dialogism to include all forms of utterance, Bradbury shows how proverbs in medieval literature are identified by textual markers (e.g., “men seyn”), or distinctive forms of syntax or style that frame an interpretive or orienting dictum for a text’s audience. Emily Steiner approaches the issues surrounding genre and scale from a different angle, examining texts that might be best characterized as “macrogenres,” expansive medieval works that seek to contain and condense history, learning, and geography into easily navigable forms. Focusing on Ranulph Higden’s fourteenth-century Latin universal history, Polychronicon, and its translation into Middle English by John Trevisa, Steiner explores the exaggerated accretiveness of this genre and how, as these compilers negotiate part and whole, they investigate the ways in which medieval genres come into being as “they exceed the forms that define them, and which they, in their turn, define.” Ethan Knapp also examines the extent to which medieval genre is represented in terms of proliferation and accretion in his study of the urban poetics of Langland, Hoccleve, and Gower. Drawing on Benjamin’s work on the material remnants of allegory in the trauerspiel, Knapp argues that allegory assumes a specifically and intimately urban shape in late medieval England, examining how its endless proliferations mirror the destabilizing energies of the urban crowd. Ultimately, the essay suggests that to recover allegory as an urban mode requires attending to the ways in which such allegories push against accepted limits of the genre and reveal allegory’s tendency to become increasingly unmoored from its material vehicles.

The final essays in the issue emphasize the ethical and affective dimensions of genre thinking. Jane Gilbert’s essay, “Genus and Genre,” turns to two Alexander romances — Alexandre de Paris’s Old French Roman d’Alexandre (1180) and the Middle English Alexander and Dindimus (c. 1350) — and a manuscript, Oxford, Bodley 264, that contains both. Gilbert shows how such texts reveal what Agamben would call “openness to closedness” insofar as they invoke and acknowledge generic constraints while testing and challenging them. These texts, Gilbert argues, “stage repeatedly the questions of the places in creation of man in general and of one man in particular — Alexander the Great — and of the relations between laws and different kinds of being (genera).” Seeta Chaganti’s essay on the “haunted lyric” shows how the ontological indeterminacy of the medieval ghost — its absent presence — offers a figure for the practical relationship between form and genre in medieval lyrics. Chaganti uses the figure of the ghost to define a medieval virtuality, one that limits the seemingly unbounded postmodern concept to its spatial and observational dimensions. Medieval genre, too, occupies this kind of space, virtual and intangible and yet acting as an absent presence that organizes the literary text and, in Chaganti’s example, the medieval carol, a lyric haunted by the ghost of the dance that gradually disappeared from its performance. As Eleanor Johnson shows in her essay, “Horrific Visions of the Host,” genre may also be known in its effects, in the cognitive or affective states that it generates. Examining host desecration narratives in the Middle English homiletic poem, Cleanness, and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament, Johnson shows how these two, seemingly dissimilar, works demonstrate a shared commitment both to rendering the horrific tales they recount as participatory, and to relating that literary engagement to larger communal participation in Christian ritual. In her response to this special issue, Ardis Butterfield returns to the question of genre as form-of-life by considering its inverse: how medieval genre also engages forms of death in its appropriation and translation of the convention and cliché. Reading Gower’s lyrics alongside those of Machaut, she shows how genre might be both “a living and a fixed process,” giving new life to “dead” patterns and forms.

Taken together, these essays begin to suggest ways in which medieval genres and genre theories might function as correctives or alternatives to modern treatments of genre insofar as they resist or complicate some of the binaries on which genre theory often relies: the instrumental and the aesthetic, the innovative and the conventional, the pure form and the hybrid, the read and the performed. They further show how genre is always implicit in medieval textual practices. As form-of-life, genre binds texts to experience, not as prescriptive “law” but as a structure for living. The porous boundaries between the “literary” and “didactic” texts examined by our contributors reflects a broader sense of permeability in medieval genres and kinds, whose taxonomies, prescriptions, and conventions take shape within a lifeworld of text and practice. This model of genre resists totalizing without eschewing structure, making it less an alienating “law” than a productive “rule.” As Agamben says of the lives of Benedictine monks, genre is a formal space of potentiality that renders texts “not ‘regular’ but ‘vital’” (Highest Poverty 26). Medieval genres and genre thinking have a vitality that presses against their historical boundaries, offering models that transcend their original contexts and articulate a form-of-life with implications for post-medieval texts and their practices.

Notes on contributors

Ingrid Nelson is Assistant Professor of English at Amherst College.

Shannon Gayk is Associate Professor of English at Indiana University.

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank our contributors for their careful and insightful work on genre, and we are especially grateful to Ardis Butterfield, Arthur Bahr, and the anonymous readers for Exemplaria for their perceptive comments on earlier versions of this essay.

Notes

1. Among the critiques inspired by Derrida’s seminal essay (“Law of Genre”) are Dimock, Through Other Continents 73–106; the essays in Warhol, ed.; Hiatt.

2. Butterfield, “Medieval Genres”; Orlemanski. For a more taxonomic approach to medieval genres, see the set of articles on narrative genres by Strohm, “Origin and Meaning” and “Middle English Narrative Genres.” Critiques of how the normative force of the “laws” of generic taxonomies intersects with cultural norms of gender and sexuality include Crane, Gaunt, and Pugh. Hiatt also attempts to break from systemic taxonomies of genre while maintaining an interest in nomenclature, noting that while “written texts did not generate their own generic nomenclature,” in adapting terms from more performative arts, they “indicate the tendency of literary texts to desystematize existing performance structures” (280). Non-medievalist work on social and cultural genre includes Jameson, esp. 103–50; Bakhtin; Miller; Coe et al.; Frow.

3. See Minnis, Medieval Theory of Authorship 9–39, and 42–58 for the commonplace that the Psalter contains all of the old and new testament.

4. Copeland and Sluiter’s introduction to their anthology of medieval grammatical and rhetorical texts offers an extremely useful survey of medieval understandings of genre (esp. 38–47).

5. Likewise, in De Vulgari Eloquentia, Dante associates genres with the three levels of style (Dante 57; see also Orlemanski 209). Of course, medieval treatises also sometimes discuss and define individual genres. For instance, Deschamps’ L’art de dictier is organized by generic description, focusing on nine vernacular genres.

6. As Copeland and Sluiter note, by the twelfth century, “modus ha[d] acquired a more precise affiliation with literary form or method, as well as with genre, while also retaining the association with mental condition or emotional state” (46).

7. Anthologies like Wogan-Browne et al., have done important work in making the theoretical aims and power of such prologues accessible to modern readers. For additional discussion of the importance of vernacular prologues, see also the chapter on “Vernacular literary consciousness c. 1100–c.1500” in Minnis and Johnson, esp. 423.

8. Cf. John of Garland’s Poetria Parisiana: “Qvinque sunt inquirenda in principio huius opusculi: scilicet material, intention auctoris, vtilitas audientis, cui parti philosophie supponatur, quis sit modus agendi” (2–3; Five things about this short work should be examined at the start: the subject matter, the author’s purpose, its usefulness for its audience, what field of knowledge it belongs to, the method).

9. This metaphor is used by many other genre theorists, including Jameson and Todorov. See Fishelov, Metaphors of Genre 85–117.

10. For a discussion of how this Romantic tripartite division of genre emerges as a misreading of Classical genre theory, see Genette.