Difficult pasts by Mimi Ensley

Difficult pasts by Mimi Ensley

Medieval romances were widely condemned by early modern thinkers: the genre of questing knights and marvellous adventure was decried as bloody, bawdy and superstitious. Despite such proclamations, though, the Middle English romance genre remained popular across the early modern period.
Difficult pasts examines the reception of Middle English romances after the Protestant Reformation in England, arguing that the genre’s popularity rested not in its violent or superstitious qualities, but in its multivocality. Incorporating insights from book history, reception history and cultural memory studies, Ensley argues that the medieval romance book became a flexible site of memory with which early modern readers could both connect with and distance themselves from the recent ‘difficult past’, a past that invited controversy and encouraged divided perspectives. Central characters in this study range from canonical authors like Geoffrey Chaucer and Edmund Spenser to less studied figures, such as printer William Copland, Elizabethan scribe Edward Banister and seventeenth-century poet and romance enthusiast, John Lane. In uniting a wide range of romance readers’ perspectives, the book complicates clear ruptures between manuscript and print, Catholic and Protestant, or medieval and Renaissance. Difficult pasts reveals how the romance book offers a new way to understand the simultaneous change and continuity that defines post-Reformation England.

'Difficult Pasts as a whole is an impressive feat of construction, managing as it does to balance critical and cultural analysis, to sort its selection of texts into deftly differentiated ways of accommodating the past, and to offer succinct but detailed accounts of the manuscripts and printed books with which it is concerned.. its breadth of reference, and its ability to speak to a number of different interests, make it satisfyingly varied and thought-provoking.'
SELIM Journal

'Difficult Pasts is a thoughtful and engaging addition to Early Modern scholarship on memory, history, and romance... should be considered a valuable resource for all Early Modern scholars and researchers interested in the connections between literature, cultural change, and cultural memory.'
Journal of English and German Philology