Marginalia

In the mid-nineteenth century, Jacob Burckhardt famously argued that the Renaissance in Italy was marked by a new understanding of the relationship of human beings to the world around them: that the subjective sense of self was not present until the early modern period; and that prior to this man defined himself in terms of his corporate identity, as civilian, as family or guild member.¹ The division that this thesis presented between the medieval world and the early modern period has been extremely persistent. Throughout the 20th century scholars such as Wallace Ferguson and Jacques le Goff tried to overthrow what they perceived to be an arbitrary, and essentially unhelpful, division; however, it was not until the 1990s, with Eamon Duffy's Stripping of the Altars (1992) and David Aers' essay 'A Whisper in the Ear of the Early Modernists' (1992), that the challenge to this periodization began to have any noticeable effect on the academic community.² Finally, at the turn of the millennia, the critical heavyweights James Simpson (Reform and Cultural Revolution, 2002) and David Wallace (Cambridge History of Medieval Literature, 1999, and Premodern Places, 2004) smashed through the boundary between these periods once and for all.

It is in the wake of these influential books that McMullan and Matthews' offering comes. The essays in this volume, written by an international group of medievalists and early modernists (James Simpson, Deanne Williams, Larry Scanlon, David Matthews, Stephane Trigg, Anke Bernau, Gordon McMullan, Bernhard Klein, Jennifer Summit, Cathy Shrank, Sarah Beckwith, Patricia Badir, and David Wallace) present a cumulative picture of the ways in which medieval culture was read and reconstructed by writers, editors, and scholars in early modern England. It also addresses the reciprocal process: the way in which early modern England, while apparently suppressing the medieval past, was in fact shaped and constructed by it.

Several of the essays examine how particular early modern authors and editors sought to illustrate a narrative continuity with medieval authors, texts and concepts. For example, Trigg's piece, 'The Vulgar History of the Order of the Garter', argues that the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century attempts to establish the origins of the Order's famous motto, honi soit qui mal y pense, were acts of medieval appropriation designed to validate a national identity. The acts of appropriation that Scanlon and Matthews' essays illustrate, however, have a different motivation: the validation of reformed doctrine. These essays examine how the printers Robert Crowley and Thomas Speght, through their editions of William Langland and Geoffrey Chaucer's works respectively, claimed medieval writers for the Protestant cause. In so doing, Scanlon and Matthews also demonstrate the important role that the Reformation played, both in forming our modern understanding of how the medieval and Renaissance interact, and also in creating the initial dislocations within this diachronic history. As an emerging community, Protestants needed to endorse themselves as valid opponents to the orthodox Church. The Roman Catholic Church had the benefit of divine approval (through the person of the Pope, God's representative on earth) and the weight of history on its side; Scanlon and Matthews adroitly show how the evangelical community attempted to establish its credibility by demonstrating its own historic underpinning.

But association with the Catholic past could also compromise the drive for change and an accurate representation of reformed faith. The other method of self-validation employed by Reformists, then, was one of disassociation. Summit's article on John Leland's Itinerary demonstrates how the author attempts not only to distance himself from the medieval past, but literally to expunge that past from the English landscape. By comparing Leland's descriptions of locations around the realm with a Pre-Reformation account of England by William Worcester, Summit establishes how, prior to the 1530s, the nation was characterized by an essentially sacred geography: places were defined by the saints associated with them, journeys determined by pilgrims' routes, and landscapes infused with a history of miracles. However, as Summit shrewdly argues, while the aim of Reformation cartography may have been to empty 'the English landscape of its immediate history by replacing it with an illustrious ancient past', in fact, as Leland's Itinerary reveals, 'in the wake of the Reformation it was impossible to experience the English landscape without also confronting physical evidence of the medieval past and the violence inflicted on it' (p. 160). The tense (and often paradoxical) negotiations required of disassociation are once again illustrated in Shrank's essay, 'John Bale and Reconfiguring the "Medieval" in Reformation England'. On the one hand, as Shrank illustrates, Bale seeks to invalidate the Catholic Church by discrediting the authority that history lends to it: the immediate past is represented as a 'dark age', which is manifested both spiritually and intellectually. On the other hand, the narrative models to which Bale turns are themselves medieval: the Chronicle, the morality play and the mystery cycle.

Given the sterling work that Simpson and Wallace have done to encourage the reassessment of periodization, it is a fitting tribute that pieces by the pair should bookend this volume. Simpson's essay, 'Diachronic history and the shortcomings of medieval studies', and Wallace's Afterword are both primarily concerned with the institutional structures that have, until now, reinforced the division between the medieval and early modern eras. Simpson proposes that we should change the way we study the Middle Ages. We should, he says, redirect our energies away from what has become a shortsighted synchronic medievalism (typified by the interdisciplinary departments of medieval studies), and turn to a more diachronic historicism by reconnecting with our early modernist colleagues. He then goes on to provide what is essentially a re-hash of the argument of Reform and Cultural Revolution: 'every revolutionary moment needs to repel the past', or 'in some profound sense create the past' (p. 21). Although an explicit appraisal of how departments need to change if further progress in trans-period criticism is going to continue and grow is valuable, the lack of new research, in either this essay or Wallace's Afterword, gives the reader the nagging feeling that these pieces have been included largely to give the volume some credibility. This is unnecessary because the volume, both in terms of the individual essays and the collection as a whole, offers a significant contribution to the field of study. The volume is not just hanging on the coat-tails of Simpson and Wallace. As Wallace aptly notes, until now 'most of the running has been made by the medievalists reading forwards rather than Renaissance scholars reading back' (p. 220). McMullan and Matthews' volume provides essays not only from the former group, but also a wealth of scholarship from early modernists recognizing the importance of the Middle Ages.

Ruth Ahnert, University of Cambridge

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NOTES

1. See Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, tr. S.G.C. Middlemore (London: Penguin, 1990).

2. David Aers' essay can be found in Culture and History, 1350-1600, ed. David Aers (New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992), pp. 177-202.