Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies by Allen J. Frantzen (review)

Book Reviews73 ALLEN J. FRANTZEN, ed. Speaking Two Languages: Traditional Disciplines and Contemporary Theory in Medieval Studies. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991. 297 p. Speaking Two Languages is an engagingcollection ofessays broughttogether in an attempt to articulate the traditional research methods of nine AngloSaxon experts—well honed in the philological skills of their trade—and the complex innovative quagmire ofpostmodern critical theory. This is a disturbing alliance to all medievalists acutely aware of the need to revitalize their field ofstudy, but reluctant to relinquish the entrenchment they hold on the textual praxis of traditional philology. The fear of turning literary monuments into mere archival documents, however, tends to be subdued by the firm conviction the academic establishment has in maintaining a scholarly aura of impartial positivism when dealing with medieval texts. A yearning to challenge traditional academic methodologies with a plurality ofcritical "languages" surfaces on every page ofthis book. Allen J. Frentzen, in a preface which is perhaps the only true unifying link ofthe whole collection, has no qualms about recognizing that every scholarly discourse constitutes a political act: "The object of criticism is not only to teach literature, but to teach critical paradigms, their transformation, and the business ofthe critics who activate them" (xiv). This seems an unnecessary caveat. Today, all graduate students, albeit unconsciously, are aware that they must learn as soon as possible how to delve into the most recent critical paradigms and try to apply them to a limited corpus of texts, hoping to find something new to say about them. Unfortunately, few have the time to acquire the training in paleography, linguistics, and historiography which provided the basic undeipinnings ofthe maligned philologists. As Adam Brooke Davis, a graduate student himself, points out in his refreshing epilogue: "There is no possibility of getting theory back into the box, and we can never again work under the idea that what we are doing is ideologically neutral" (215). "Literary monuments," unfortunately, can also be drowned under the theoretical apparatus that should enhance them, and the collaborative effort of Speaking Two Languages is not totally immune to this peril. The essays in Speaking Two Languages are the outcome of a seminar that took place at Loyola University of Chicago in February 1989. The book is a response of Old and Middle English scholarship to the recent New Philology movement set in motion by the special issues of Romanic Review 79 (1988) and Speculum 65 (1990). The challenging ideas of these "new philologists" have had a stimulating effect on medieval studies and will continue to do so for some time; however their aim is not to combine distinct theoretical methodologies and to articulate them in a so-called "two language motif." Their agenda is a reaffirmation of the legitimacy of their methodology and of the belief of the revitalizing powers of philology in these postmodern times. Judging by the contents ofthe book, Anglo-Saxon scholarship seems to favor issues dealing with the textualization of oral tradition and with reading reception. John Miles Foley views the issue of orality as fundamentally a problem of reception and consequently applies Iser's theory of aesthetic reception to posit that, in the absence of an authoritative text, "tradition in 74Rocky Mountain Review effect makes each performance an authoritative 'document' " (150). Tradition supplies both readers and listeners with a unifying horizon of expectation, a body of shared knowledge that medies them participants in the hermeneutic process. In his study ofa corpus ofhybrid Anglo-Latin and Anglo-Saxon texts, Martin Irvine adopts Foucault's concept ofarchive and the archaeological model to posit five macrogenres or systematizing levels ofdiscourse: lexicon, the gloss, the compilation, the library, and the encyclopedia. For him, the oral traits in the text are not an after-image of an oral past but rather a disclosure of the textuality of an age of great textual sophistication. His suggestion that these oral traits could be "indications of a nostalgia for a lost, or at least historically prior, oral past" (197) is not very convincing. Clare A. Lees also attempts to combine Foucault's archaeological model, pragmatics, and Jauss' reception theory in her study of Old English homilies. Psychoanalysis and feminist approaches...