Review

General Books

Viewed as a work useful for undergraduates, a mixed notice is about the best I can give the collection of fourteen essays that follow the editor's introduction. In fairness, many of my criticisms lie with the enterprise itself--a postcolonial analysis imposed on medieval society--rather than the way in which it is carried out, or put to work, in this volume. Postcolonial explorations of medieval European society, like those conducted under the comparable banners of postmodernism and the new historicism, rest on the idea that ideologies and analytical methods that have been fruitful for 20th century social and literary (and linguistic) criticism can be applied to this earlier world. The postcolonial assault rests heavily on a conceptual framework offered by Edward Said and, in a much murkier fashion, on a literary and linguistic framework emanating from the work of Homi Bhaba (with liberal sprinklings of Gayatri Spivak and Stephen Greenblatt, among others). Thus, at least as I grasp the matter, we are going to be confronted by the question of anachronism, of the explication of medieval literary passages that are or that seem to be like "other" (i.e., post-medieval) ones, and by the unrelenting resort to a vocabulary that revels in its own self-referential exoticism rather than in lucidity and user-friendly technology.	1
But there are two sides to most issues, and to balance my criticism it is only proper to pay some homage to the value of the approach represented by this collection which focuses on both literary and historical texts. Any reappraisal of medieval sources, and any rethinking of the context within which they were written and in which we now read them, is one to be taken seriously. From the postcolonial agenda, whatever its origins and its modernist and presentist imperatives, we can enrich our interpretation of the role of hierarchy and status, of a world so deliberately built around the distinction and gulf between "us" and "them," and of western Europe's xenophobic and willfully blind and/or stupid treatment of all whom it classifies as outsiders. As we have turned away from a classroom presentation of medieval society as a seamless garment of white Christian (and predominantly male) life and thought, so it behooves us to cheer these assaults upon the citadel.	2
The lessons of these essays are most applicable, for the historian, when they fall into two categories. Some of the papers concentrate on arguing that medieval European society needed an other, a framing of identity, if not necessarily of reality, in terms of alterity. As such, Chaucer needed his Jews (as did Shakespeare); the romance of Richard Coer de Lyon needed its cannibalism (Geraldine Heng's paper); Gerald of Wales needed hybridity to straddle the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic worlds (Jeffrey Cohen's paper). The other line of analysis concentrates on the search for medieval roots and origins of what have become the tropes and tricks of current analysis: the relativism of spatial and geographic orientation (Suzanne Akbari), or vernacular literature and the imperialist enterprise (John Bowers, on Chaucer), or fetishism in early narratives of European expansion and colonialism (Steven Kruger). Moving back and forth with little regard for the bounds of chronology or the direction of time's arrow is integral to this whole approach. Tariq Ali's 1998 The Book of Saladin (in John Ganim's essay), or John Buchan's 1910 Prester John (in Michael Uebel's paper) are windows whereby an exposition of medieval modes of expression and categorization are opened; in a simpler world, such essays might have been read as medievalism, rather than as contributions to new historicism. Nor does an historian's unease at some stretches and leaps in time and social relationships diminish under the heavy barrage of such terms and phrases as "the West discovers its own modernity," or "caricatured corporeality is wholly consonant," or "permanently anterior time"; neither am I taken with "allosemitic" or "carnelize" or "dejudaize."	3
The authors of these essays have a lot to say, a lot of points that must be taken seriously and incorporated into mainstream teaching and interpretation. Unfortunately, they are inclined to have their say in a way that makes them impenetrable to students and of limited value to their old-fashioned colleagues who are working to hold their own and who are still expected to "man" the trenches and to convey material, in some chronological and social arrangement, from that strange country of the Past to the students of the present (and the near future).	4
State University of New York at Stony Brook Joel T. Rosenthal

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