Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn by David Wallace (review)

REVIEWS text within which it positions its explorations of agency. In the final analysis, Chaucer’s Agents demonstrates that broadening our set of critical and theoretical references can inform as well as challenge our interpretive practices. Tara Williams Oregon State University David Wallace. Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. Pp. ix, 342. $34.95, paper and $73.95, cloth. It is impossible not to reflect on the process of reading David Wallace’s Premodern Places. Umberto Eco famously commented that the first hundred pages of The Name of the Rose served as a kind of initiation rite for his readers: if you could only get through these, you were somehow fitted, or trained, to read the rest of the novel. Reading Premodern Places provides almost the opposite experience: I almost felt I had to unlearn how to read. Reading this book in my formal academic way (what are the assumptions and arguments that drive the work? what does it omit or repress? how can I use it for my own work?) initially led to some anxiety, since at one level the book proceeds by suggestive indirection rather than conventional argument, by mimesis rather than diegesis. The introduction does, however, provide all the clues one needs to become Wallace’s ideal reader. These pages range from autobiographical (transatlantic) narrative to theoretical reflections on times and places within the rough geographical and historical limits set out in the title: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn. We might, indeed, add a third, methodological frame: Benjamin to Barthes. Wallace articulates a relationship between Barthes’s punctum and Benjamin’s emphasis on the constellation of past and present in a ‘‘flash’’ of illumination, to frame his meditations on places chosen in part—and this is crucial to the book’s organization— because they no longer produce the symbolic resonance they once did. ‘‘Narratives of outward expansion and homeward return, of translation and conversion, have designs on these places, but each place interpelPAGE 557 557 ................. 16596$ CH13 11-01-10 14:08:52 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER lates or buttonholes us with its own images and tales, distracting us from grander visions of geographical space and historical process’’ (p. 2). Admitting to the ease of becoming distracted, of bringing our own feelings and emotions about places (p. 16) into play, releases the reader into the pleasurable Barthesian leisure of following the movement of texts, people, and ideas as Wallace, our time-travel tour guide, takes us to his six locations—Calais, Flanders, Somerset, Genoa, the Canary Islands , and Surinam—and back and forward across the medieval, the early modern, and the modern, frequently exceeding the chronological boundaries implied in his title. For example, chapter 3, ‘‘Dante in Somerset ,’’ begins with traces of a lost manuscript of Giovanni Bertoldi’s Latin translation (1416) of the Commedia that, according to John Leland, once graced the Cathedral library at Wells; considers the Council of Constance, where Bertoldi completed the translation, as a center for cultural exchange; tracks Bertoldi’s consciousness of England and northern Europe as an important reception context for Dante and the ironic complexities of using Latin as the means for such dissemination; explores the depths of readership and literacy at Wells (Polydore Vergil was appointed archdeacon there in 1508); ponders the possibility of a twinned English reception of Dante as both Catholic and proto-Wycliffite ; describes the ‘‘psychotic demands’’ (p. 161) of John Leland’s adulation for the king, who causes the destruction of the books he loves; and finally, via Coleridge’s admittedly rather tenuous links with the Bristolbased slave trade, offers a meditation on the means by which ‘‘certain ghostly figures—Dante, black slaves—fade from the scene’’ of Somerset (p. 166), leaving only the impoverished cultural stereotype of provincial England. For Premodern Places is a book about cultural memory, but it is also about cultural forgetting. What do we remember and forget, from the Middle Ages through to the present, about all these places? One of the most powerful threads running through the whole book is the forgotten history of premodern slavery in Europe. The history of Genoa and its trafficking in...