Materiality and the canon: manuscripts, fragments, and medieval outlaw literature

This essay examines the place of outlaw literature, particularly the English tradition of Robin Hood narratives, on the outskirts of the literary canon. It considers that the ‘flawed’ material contexts for much of the literature is linked to a set of anxieties around incompleteness, lack of clear origins, and fragmentariness, and that the material contexts also lead to assumptions around literariness. It takes as case-studies one later-medieval manuscript and a fragment from the same period, both preserving important and unique pieces of Robin Hood literature, and argues for them as typical material survivals from this period.