Introduction: Genre as Form-of-Life

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.