Place, Space, and Landscape in Medieval Narrative (review)

Described by editor Laura Howes as part of "an ongoing investigation of place and spatial relationships in medieval culture" (viii), Place, Space, and Landscape in Medieval Narrative offers its readers twelve essays on the spatial practices of medieval texts from the English, French, Italian, Latin, and Spanish literary traditions. What unites the collection is a sense of space as "defined by movement and by human experience" (viii), a viewpoint indebted to thinkers like de Certeau, Foucault, and Lefebvre. Howes's brief introduction is largely devoted to a summary of the volume's contents; for a fully developed statement of purpose, the reader must turn to John Ganim's "Landscape and Late Medieval Literature: A Critical Geography." Building on Foucault's sense that space should be understood as "dialectical, dynamic, and creative" (xv), Ganim offers up a survey of twentieth-century approaches to spatial questions, one in which medievalists rub shoulders with theorists of space. His review of spatial thinkers is welcome, but more significant is his observation that "domestic" space in the texts of the Western Middle Ages undergoes "a certain orientalization" (xxi). The biblical cycles are "a test case" for this observation, re-creating through performance "a memory of the originary geography of the Holy Land itself" (xxi). Ganim thus resituates these heavily localized celebrations in a newly global context: "England mounts performances in which the spaces of the city become as if the places of the Holy Land at a time when the possibility of pilgrimage and reconquest grows increasingly unlikely" (xxiv). The as-yet-undeveloped postcolonial reading of medieval English drama will clearly begin here.

After Ganim's essay, Place, Space, and Landscape splits into three sections, the first of which concerns itself with readings of historical locales. Lisa Cooper takes on twelfth-century Bruges in "Making Space for History: Galbert of Bruges and the Murder of Charles the Good," identifying in Galbert's chronicle accounts of the count's murder a "careful attention to physical space of all kinds" (5). Particularly noteworthy is Cooper's conclusion that Galbert saw "the mind as but one more space that could be laid open by the historiographer's piercing and omniscient eye" (16), an "imaginative penetration of space" that involves the "stretching of historical 'fact' beyond the limits of 'objective' reality" (21). In "A Camp Wedding: The Cultural Context of Chaucer's Brooch of Thebes," William Askins is ostensibly writing about fourteenth-century Plymouth, location of the 1386 wedding of John Holland and Elizabeth Lancaster. But he devotes relatively little space to Plymouth as space, preferring instead to situate Chaucer's "Complaint of Mars" and "Complaint of Venus" in time, reading the wedding as the occasion for the two poems. As a result, his essay seems out of place in the overall scheme of the anthology. Lawrence Warner's "Adventurous Custance: St. Thomas of Acre and Chaucer's Man of Law's Tale" concentrates on a single building, London's Church of St. Thomas of Acre. As a structure "in which the mercantile and the military are inextricably fused" (45), St. Thomas of Acre represents in situ the romance and bourgeois dynamics driving Chaucer's version of the Custance story. Although Warner is ultimately unable to establish a direct connection between poet and church, his essay nonetheless offers a convincing portrayal of a deeper cultural context for the Tales.

The second section of the book moves from historical to fictional spaces. In Thomas Heffernan's "'The sun shall be turned to darkness and the moon to blood': How Sin and Redemption Affect Heavenly Space in an Old English Transfiguration Homily," an anonymous sermon "illustrates the complex understanding that English monastics of the late tenth century had of the relationship of sin to the natural world" (75). Heffernan's piece is a solid source study, but it resembles Askins's essay in having only a tenuous connection to the models of spatial practice outlined in the introductions of Howes...