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172 Reviews Biddick, Kathleen, The Shock of Medievalism, Durham N C and London, Duke University Press, 1998; pp. 315; 12 b / w illustrations; R.R.P. US$49.95 (cloth), US$17.95 (paper). Dahood, Roger, ed., The Future of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance Problems, Trends, and Opportunitiesfor Research (Arizona Studies in Middle Ages and the Renaissance 2), Turnhout, Brepols, 1998; board; pp. vi, 194; R.R.P. not known. These books are about the limits of the study of medieval culture and more particularly the future and current standing of medieval studies as a discipline (especially in the North American context). In this respect they continue what has become almost an obsession over the past decade in North American medieval studies with historicising and theorising the discipline. As its subtitle suggests, Dahood's volume of essays (drawn from the annual conference of the Arizona Centre for Medieval and Renaissance Studies) surveys the field and its prospects anxiously. Biddick's book, by contrast, looks to shock and transgress, to make hitherto unthought of collocations, dragging medieval studies into the world of postcolonialism, gender studies, and queer theory. As its recent presence as a strand of major conferences in medieval studies suggests, 'medievalism', the term apparently first coined by John Ruskin, has been accepted as a legitimate area within medieval studies, denoting the study of the post-medieval re-use of medieval ideas. However, as Richard J . Utz points out in his essay in Dahood's volume, 'Resistance to (The N e w ) Medievalism?', the 'medievalism' announced in such t i t l e s as The New Medievalism (ed. Marina S. Brownlee, Kevin Brownlee, and Stephen G. Nichols, 1991), and Medievalism and the Modernist Temper (ed. Nichols and R. Howard Bloch, 1996) is simply 'medieval studies'. In Germany, as Utz says, there is no terminological difficulty because Mittelalter-rezeption is a well-established area. But in establishing the 'ne medievalism' and the closely related 'new philology', the Brownlees, Bloch, and Nichols simply ignore the long tradition of new philology in Europe. In fact what the North American new philology calls the old philology i s the new, as far as most Europeans are concerned. Utz's essay is a timely setting straight of the record. Instead of being placed in the larger of the two parts of this book, the miscellany, i t should Reviews 173 I think have gone with the panel discussion and essay of Part I, entitled 'A Dialogue'. Most of the essays in the volume, interesting as many of them are, actually have nothing to do with the concerns announced in the title, so that this is not truly a themed volume. In the opening panel discussion , featuring brief statements about their disciplines from Leslie J. Workman, T. A. Shippey, Allen J. Frantzen, Paul E. Szarmach, Richard J. Utz, William D. Paden, and Arthur F. Kinney, perhaps the most striking thing is the way in which Kinney's statement glows with optimism by comparison with the rest. The reason? Kinney is the sole early modernist on the panel. Kathleen Biddick's attempt to think about medievalism begins more programmatically: her essays, she says, 'explore the contemporary consequences of the methods used to institute medieval studies as an academic discipline in the nineteenth century'. Biddick believes that this legacy is still influential on medieval studies. That is uncontroversial, but she goes on to contend that the m a n y recent studies of 'this nineteenthcentury heritage' have 'assured us that [it] can n o w be put safely behind medieval studies'. In this w a y she attempts to establish the novelty of her own enterprise, but I think Lee Patterson and Allen Frantzen would be surprised tofindthemselves in the long endnote that accompanies this suggestion (and so identified with quietism about the past of medieval studies). In the nineteenth century, Biddick argues, a positivist medieval studies demonised less scientific practices, calling them 'medievalism'. Medievalism was therefore 'a fabricated effect of this newly forming medieval studies...its despised "other", its exteriority'. This definition does not escape the problems of the more usual definition of medievalism I mentioned above. As medieval studies and medievalism are obviously...

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