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Reviewed by:
  • King Arthur and the Myth of History
  • Kathleen Biddick
King Arthur and the Myth of History. By Laurie Finke and Martin B. Shichtman (Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 2004) 272 pp. $59.95

Over the past decade, scholars of the European Middle Ages and postcolonial historians have formed exciting alliances devoted to questioning entrenched Eurocentric concepts of modernity. The story of Arthur, the once and future king, with its hints of other temporalities—ones that do not conventionally divide a "then" from the modern "now"—has provided rich subject matter. Finke and Shichtman examine Arthurian literature drawn from three periods of cultural crisis: the Norman colonization of England (eleventh through twelfth century), the War of the Roses (fifteenth century), and two books on Adolf Hitler and the Arthurian occult written in the 1970s. The volume under review is the fourth in a quartet of recent postcolonial publications on Arthur: Michelle R. Warren's History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain 1100–1300 (Minneapolis, 2000); Patricia Clare Ingham, Sovereign Fantasies: Arthurian Romance and the Making of Britain (Philadelphia, 2001); Geraldine Heng, Empire of Magic, Medieval Romance and the Politics of Cultural Fantasy (New York, 2003). Even though Finke and Shichtman refer to these three companion studies, they do not adequately account for their implications. In this gap between acknowledgment and [End Page 105] dynamic critical transformation can be traced the challenges currently facing postcolonial medieval studies.

In this collaborative study, the authors analyze a selection of Arthurian texts as metropolitan productions circulated by court clerics and printers in competition for symbolic capital. Warren and Ingham have shown how medieval Arthurian chronicles and romances are riven with border writing (Welsh, Norman, Breton, and Scots). Taken together, these three studies suggest that we need more complex ways of imagining the contested narrative layerings of border and metropolis. Finke and Shichtman are also wary of Heng's claim that Arthurian romance emerged out of the traumatic events during the First Crusade when Christians cannibalized dead Muslims during the extremes of siege warfare. In their critical desire to emphasize the provincialism of medieval European Christendom, the authors miss the opportunity to put their provincializing argument together with Heng's to draw richer implications.

Arthurian narratives are striking for their turn to prophecy. Such recursive staging of vaticinatory traditions needs to bear on the discussion of Arthurian historicism, yet this issue too remains unaddressed. Ingham maintains that deeply ingrained evolutionary models of history (normalized versions of modernity) have blinded us to the cultural work of Arthurian prophecy. She shows how the study of these prophecies opens up another way of imagining the "unhistorical" in postmedieval medieval studies. She traces how the prophecies move dialectically between the prediction of devastating loss and the image of a communitarian future produced as a work of mourning. Merlin's prophecies ask such questions as, Who gets to own periodization?

The hesitations of the authors are productive. They suggest that a commonly shared framework of postcolonial medieval studies is preventing a more thorough questioning of models of modernity that circulate in medieval studies. Like much other postcolonial medieval scholarship, the authors enfold their analysis within a normative historicist framework defined by the work of Anderson and Kantorowicz.1 They use Anderson's modernization thesis to show how Arthur became modern. Finding a "modern" Arthur reinforces precisely the Eurocentric models of modernity that are supposedly in question. Postcolonial medievalists need to address more thoughtfully the compelling critique of Anderson's thesis by postcolonial such scholars as Bhabha, Chatterjee, and Chakrabarty.2 Recent Arthurian studies also rely heavily on Kantorowicz's work.

Finke and Schichtman adopt Kantorowicz's notion of the king's [End Page 106] two bodies to identify the blind spot of a "modernizing" Arthurian narrative. They locate it in the violence that exceeds chivalric rules and strews the text with the broken bodies of a shattered body politic. They use this shattered body politic, called the "anamorphic blot" of the Arthurian imaginary, as a bridge to their readings on Hitler and the Arthurian occult circulated in the 1970s. The argument moves too fast at this juncture. It leaves unaddressed how political theology, developed and criticized...

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