Nation and Compilation in England, 1270-1500

Abstract

Scholarship has frequently explored how people in medieval England engaged the concept of nation. Scholarship has also investigated the manners in which book production participated in and enacted cultural phenomena. Hitherto, there has been limited consideration of these two concerns together. This is problematic because the manuscripts which carry medieval texts to modern scholars offer the best evidence of contemporary reception of these texts. This dissertation fills this void. It unites questions of compilation and nation in the study of medieval England from 1270 to 1500. It explores the manner in which the collection of works in one manuscript—the manuscript matrix—engages, shapes, denies, or ignores the discourses of the English nation. The dissertation opens with consideration of the textual network of those manuscripts containing one or two tales of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. It further argues that such study reveals a political interpretation at the heart of the Clerk's Tale. This dissertation's attention to the manuscript matrix also challenges longstanding proto-nationalist readings of Layamon's Brut and Thomas Malory's Morte Darthur and replaces these with more complicated interpretations of their engagement with nation. Ultimately, the manuscript matrix proves a powerful tool for demonstrating the pluralistic and paradoxical engagements with concepts of nation within late medieval England.