Virginia Woolf’s Middle Ages

Abstract

This essay concentrates on the last phase of Woolf’s career, from the mid-1930s to her death, and on the relation between the individual and the community which at that time exercises her deeply, and on how her response to the Middle Ages, and to one of its writers in particular, Dante, relates to this concern. In a prospective history of literature originally entitled Reading at Random, which Woolf worked on in the last months of her life, the opening two unfinished chapters “Anon” and “The Reader” trace the course of British literature from its earliest oral inception to the crucial invention of printing at the Renaissance, regarding this key cultural shift with typical Woolfian ambivalence as marking both significant loss and gain. In the medieval period, Woolf tells us,

anonymity was a great possession. It gave the early writing an impersonality, a generality. It gave us the ballads; it gave us the songs. It allowed us to know nothing of the writer: and so to concentrate upon his song. Anon had great privileges. He was not responsible. He was not self conscious … He can borrow. He can repeat. He can say what every one feels. No one tries to stamp his own name, to discover his own experience, in his work … The anonymous playwright has like the singer this nameless vitality, something drawn from the crowd in the penny seats and not yet dead in ourselves.¹