ABSTRACT
Originality is a word that makes most modern critics and teachers of medieval poetry slightly uneasy; we have good reason. Nineteenth-and early twentieth-century critics - at least the majority of those who concerned themselves with medieval literature - so insisted upon "originality" as a criterion of literary value, so often preferred the "personal" to the traditional, and therefore so often undervalued the artistic uses of conventions and traditions, that we who study and teach this literature are still forced to spend a good deal of our time demonstrating to our students - and even to our colleagues - that medieval literature can be, and usually is, valuable precisely because of its traditional nature, its very lack of "originality" in the modern sense of that word. As a result, few critics today make the old mistake of seeing Chaucer's career as a struggle to "break the chains of convention" and fewer than ever still regard the so-called Anglo-Saxon elegies as Wordsworthian lyrics. Yet the prejudices that cluster about "originality" are such that we continue to feel that to talk very much about the "originality" of a medieval poem may be a sort of disloyalty to our guild.
