Late Middle Ages

Literature, Music, and Performance in the Late Middle Ages

The years between roughly 1300 and 1500 saw, in the cultures of western Christendom, a flowering of literary, musical, and theatrical production that has rarely been matched. This section examines that flowering in three connected parts. The first article treats the rise of vernacular literature in the major European languages: the Canterbury Tales of Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1400), the Confessio Amantis of John Gower, the Piers Plowman of William Langland (c. 1370–90), the lais and ballades of Guillaume de Machaut, the lyric poetry of Christine de Pizan, and the satirical Testament of François Villon (1461). The second article surveys the music of the period: the polyphonic motet and Missa of the ars nova and ars subtilior composers, the smooth English contenance angloise of John Dunstaple and Leonel Power, and the great Burgundian polyphony of Guillaume Dufay and Gilles Binchois. The third article treats the stage: the mystères, miracles, and moralités of the urban guild theatres, with the surviving cycles of York, Chester, Wakefield, and N-Town, and the parish-cloister traditions from which they emerged.

The vernacular turn

The late medieval period saw the deliberate replacement of Latin by the vernaculars as the language of literature, government, and law. The development was uneven: the courts of Castile and Aragon continued to use Castilian and Catalan for chronicles and law from the late 1200s, the chancery of Edward III shifted to English in the 1360s, and the French of the Grands Rhétoriqueurs of the late fifteenth century was a self-conscious literary artefact. The case of England is the most studied. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales (begun c. 1387, the Hengwrt manuscript c. 1400), Gower’s Confessio Amantis (1390–93), Langland’s Piers Plowman (the Z-text c. 1370s, the C-text of the 1380s–90s), and the alliterative Morte Arthure, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and the Pearl-poet’s work in the manuscript Cotton Nero A.x (c. 1390–1400) together form a body of writing in a single generation that defined the English literary language for the next three centuries.

The scholarship is rich. The philological tradition that began with Frederick James Furnivall and the Early English Text Society in the 1860s, and continued with George Lyman Kittredge and W. W. Skeat, was transformed in the second half of the twentieth century by Derek Pearsall and by the new historicism of the 1980s and 1990s, exemplified by Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (1991), and the social-historical approach of Steven Justice, Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (1994), which re-situated the literature in the political turbulence of the reigns of Richard II and Henry IV. For the continental vernaculars, Daniel Poirion’s work on the Rhétoriqueurs is the standard reference; the case of Christine de Pizan, edited by Charity Cannon Willard and now by the ongoing Lettres gothiques project, has done most to revise the canon.

Polyphony and the choir

The music of the late medieval period was the music of the choir, the chapel, and the cour amoureuse of the early fifteenth-century courts. The technical revolution is the ars nova — Philippe de Vitry’s treatise of c. 1320 — which gave composers isorhythm and the new mensural notation of the prolatio, and which was brought to a peak in the ars subtilior of the late fourteenth century (Baude Cordier, Johannes Cuvelier, and the Codex Chantilly, c. 1390). The new sound was the English contenance angloise of Dunstaple, Power, and their followers on the continent, with its smooth, consonant, parallel motion, and the Burgundian synthesis of Dufay, Binchois, and later Ockeghem, Busnoys, and Obrecht.

The historiographical debate is one of the more productive in medieval studies. The view that late medieval polyphony was a slow decline from the Notre-Dame polyphony of the twelfth century — Heinrich Besseler’s Das musikalische Hören der Neuzeit (1959) — has been replaced by the synthesis of Margaret Bent, Music in the Late Medieval West (1990), and Reinhard Strohm, The Rise of European Music, 1380–1500 (1993), which treat the period as a positive invention of new techniques and a wider listening public. The English tradition has its own literature, from Ernest H. Sanders to the late Andrew Kirkman, The Cultural Life of the Early English Polyphonic Style (2010), and the CANTUS database of monastic office chants and the CDA of fifteenth-century polyphony have begun to make the repertory computable.

Stage and street

The dramatic literature of the late Middle Ages was a literature of the city. The mystery cycles of York (the Ordo Paginarum of 1378), Chester, Wakefield, and N-Town are the four English survivals of a European-wide phenomenon that included the Jeux de la Passion of the Confrérie de la Passion in Paris (the mystère of Arnoul Gréban, c. 1450), the Italian sacra rappresentazione, the Fastnachtspiel of Nuremberg, and the Valencian misteri del rei Herodes. The English cycles were the work of the trade guilds, who mounted them on the moving pageant-waggon that stopped at the twelve to sixteen stations of the city. The work of the past fifty years — the Records of Early English Drama project (REED), the Early Theatre journal, and the editions in the TEAMS Middle English Texts Series — has reconstructed the political, occupational, and devotional contexts of a once popular art. E. K. Chambers, The Mediaeval Stage (1903), remained the standard reference for nearly a century and was supplemented by Glynne Wickham’s The Medieval Theatre (1974) and, in the 1990s, by the cultural-historical work of Kathleen M. Ashley and Wim N. M. Husken, Aspects of Early English Drama (2003); for the French material, Charles Mazouer’s Histoire du théâtre médiéval (1998) is the standard reference. The picture that has emerged is of a dramatic practice that was at once devotional and civic, a continuation of the liturgy and a vernacular replacement of it, and that ended in the early sixteenth century in England not because of an early Reformation hostility to the stage, but because the guilds’ pageant-waggon system could not be sustained by the early-Tudor municipalities.

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