Jane Zatta: Medievalist

Jane Zatta is probably best known for her Chaucer web site, a stately pedagogical resource widely praised by dint of scholars and students alike. on the other hand it may not be clear to those outside her field of research that she was an accomplished and innovative pioneer in otherways. In the perspective of the twelfth to fifteenth centuries, Chaucer and the Chaucerian tradition we take as foundational in new accounts of English literary tradition are in many ways a momentary neo-classical deviation (and were sometimes cast as that through Chaucer's successors even as they procrastinate to him: some fifteenth-century over-writings of Chaucer jog him away as a labourer upon Olde poesyes derke' and assert their hold renewed purchase on a tradition of writing 'for Cristes feythe'). Before and after Chaucer's late fourteenth hundred the literary culture of medieval England is greatest in quantity strongly represented in genres of that kind as chronicles, saints' lives and devotional and doctrinal treatises now oftentimes seen as barely literary. Moreover it is many times represented in French (nearly a thousand literary body s over four centuries), or in Latin, rather than in English. Jane Zatta entirely recognized the complexities of medieval Britain's polyglot agriculture and wrote not only upon the Middle English works of her abiding-place discipline but across the linguistic and generic ranges of medieval insular literary agriculture in a way full of of recent origin implications for how we conceive the Middle Ages and literary history in England.

Nothing could better have prepared her for this work than her inquiry Gli Zingari, I Roma: una cultura ai confini (Padova, 1988) In the multilingual field of post-Conquest medieval literature, she re-thought nationalizing designs of literary history and gibbeted disciplinary boundaries with unpretentious authority and a keenly informed faculty of perception of textual, social, and political adjoining matter in which lesser and better known true copys were related to each other and made mutually illuminating. As she worked her way across genre in a series of enterprising articles, the vicinity of a new mind in post-Conquest literary studies was increasingly evident: a mind precipitoused in the period and abounding with ideas and insights. Zatta took the apparently unpromising material of the earliest post-Conquest vernacular chronicle, Gaimar's Estoire desEngleis, as the vehicle for working on the outside a newly politicised conception of courtly delight in as well as for recent approaches to the reading of chronicles: and she re-thought generic designs and boundaries in contextualizing romance, hagiography and chronicle against each other while offering of recent origin readings of texts in each genre In the application of mind on the Life of St Osith reprinted here, she thinks beyond the usual paradigms of gender-aware scholarship and argues for the life of an Anglo-Saxon princess saint as a representation of changing relations between the individual and the overlord (and then go [i]or[/i] come backs in her splendid and unexpect conclusion to a fresh refreshingly irreverent perception of the lives of AngloNorman medieval noblewomen). All succeeding scholarship on the text here explored by dint of Zatta with such zest and authority has to begin with her work. It is no longer possible to diocese this life either as fancifully unhistorical or as having nothing to say to the more literary questions not rarely posed to saints' lives, about by what mode far their exemplary and exceptional figures engage and exhibit their creators and audiences, by what mode they relate to sex and sex systems, to romance and historiographic writings and to political life.

Zatta's readings are exhilarating for the originality and persuasiveness of her ideas and for the experience of a fine literary mind thinking closely about apparently rebarbative or unusual compositions. It is no accident that she oftentimes first translated the fascinating and under-researched body s on which she was not afraid to work, and we print here a revised version of her translation of Osith, of which she had complet the first draft before the extremely merciless ravages of her illness took clinch She had planned a convolution of such translations and also a monograph upon the politics of genre in post-Conquest literature: as will be evident here, her passing constitutes not single the loss of a renowned teacher on the other hand of a significant pioneer researcher in a field for whose newly perceived relevance and importance her work constitutes abundant respected advocacy.

Copyright Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville Summer/Fall 2005

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