The Endurance of Formalism in Middle English Studies

In spite of the historicism that has dominated medieval English literary study for the past two decades, formalist approaches will not go away. Not only is close reading still the default mode of pedagogy for many medievalists, but certain genres (especially the Middle English lyric) still attract formalist criticism. This article argues that historicist criticism has excluded such genres from the current mainstream of literary history, and that, to some extent, the canon of Middle English literature (and, in particular, of Chaucerian production) has been reshaped according to historicist critical and ideological goals. But there remains a place for the study of form, as formal patterns (in the words of the critic Franco Moretti), ‘are what literature uses in order to master historical reality’. Formalist analysis in medieval literary study needs to be reclaimed from its New Critical close reading, but it also needs to be seen as the place where aesthetics and ideology may come together.