This introductory essay argues for the importance of reevaluating the genres and genre theories of medieval England. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben's notion of "form-of-life," based on monastic liturgical practice, the essay considers how early writing represents genre as intrinsically linked with experience and practice, and it demonstrates how genre is always implicit in medieval textual practices. As form-of-life, genre binds texts to experience, not as prescriptive "law" but as a structure for living. In medieval genres and kinds, taxonomies, prescriptions, and conventions take shape within a lifeworld of text and practice. And, for this reason, early genre and genre theory resist or complicate some of the binaries on which later genre theory sometimes relies: the instrumental and the aesthetic, the innovative and the conventional, the pure form and the hybrid, the read and the performed.keywords genre theory, genre, form-of-life, Agamben, Piers Plowman, vernacular literary theory, medieval genreIn the long history of theorizing genre, medieval writing has often been treated as an exception, a disruption, or a discontinuity. As Benedetto Croce put it in 1902, "The Italian Renaissance critics, while working at their Poetics in the style of Aristotle, found themselves confronted with chivalric poetry, and had to make the best of it" (440). The hybridity and mutability of medieval genres have long challenged modern genre theories based on taxonomy, from the neoclassicism of Renaissance poetics to Kant's a priori aesthetics. But if this disjunction suggests that genres are historic and contingent, genre theory, too, changes in response to diachronic cultural shifts. Croce's own rejection of the "scientific" abstraction of genre in favor of an "aesthetic" practice of contemplation of the particular work is built on a history of genre theory that demonstrates that an oscillation between embrace and rejection of generic laws characterizes the field (32-38; 449-58 In particular, a resurgence of interest in Jacques Derrida's claim that the normative force of the law of genre contains its own disruption has led to explorations of the hybridity, contingency, and exception central to all genre theory.1 Perhaps because of its long history as an exception to modern genre theory, medieval literature has inspired a body of criticism that emphasizes the social and practical aspects of genre, taking into account what Fredric Jameson called "the radical discontinuity of modes of production and of their cultural expressions" (130). The critic Hans Robert Jauss's concept of medieval genre as an audience's "horizon of expectations" (76-109) inaugurated a small but incisive body of criticism that examines how genre creates and is created by social structures, use-contexts, and use-value. Thus, in response to post-structuralist critiques of the "law" of genre, this special issue suggests thinking instead of the "rule" of genre. In Derrida's analysis, "law" stands above and apart from practice, not an "imperative constraint" but rather ...
