The documentary imagination: Literature and bureaucracy in thirteenth- and fifteenth-century England

This dissertation shows how the invention of bureaucratic government changed the writing of literature in medieval England. Earlier than most countries in Europe, England in the Middle Ages developed an intricate royal bureaucracy with elaborate methods for classifying, disseminating, and storing administrative documents in archives. The systems of documentary transaction, storage, and verification that characterized this precocious bureaucracy changed contemporary ideas about the nature and use of writing. The practical exigencies of using systematized documentary organization to bolster claims of royal authority encouraged literate, clerical bureaucrats to reconceive their ideas about the relationship between language, writing, time, and representation. These innovative ideas were in turn disseminated by the administrative documents that occasioned them, and thereby became immensely productive far beyond their place of origin. This dissertation describes the development of these characteristically bureaucratic notions of writing and closely examines their effect on four works of literature seemingly unrelated to the immediate concerns of government administration.; Chapter One, "Documents, Bracton, and the Ancrene Wisse," shows how an early thirteenth-century devotional manual and legal treatise are influenced by concurrent textual and intellectual innovations in royal documentary bureaucracy. Chapter Two, "The Documentary Imagination: Glanville to Matthew Paris," looks in greater detail at bureaucratic intellectual culture, finding that bureaucrats, and the writers influenced by them, are preoccupied with using the organizational potential of writing to control perceptions of the passage of time. Chapter Three, "Litigation and Family: The Paston Letters," shows how the bureaucratic language of documentary legal proceedings not only determines the style and structure of a collection of family letters, but becomes the medium through which family relationships and identity are felt, understood, and articulated. Chapter Four, "The End of Privacy: Letters in Malory," considers one writer's attempt to shield his work from such absorption into a documentary idiom. Charting the various ways in which Malory rebuffs political commitment, it concludes that such commitment can, in the end, only be avoided by sacrificing semantic coherence.