Rethinking the New Medievalism ed. by R. Howard Bloch et al. (review)

It is always difficult to update the new. This volume sets itself the hard task of revivifying a 1990 issue of Speculum, called “The New Philology,” that took medieval studies by storm. Steven Nichols’s brilliant essay and catchphrase, published a year after Bernard Cerquiglini’s similarly eye-catching “éloge de la variante,” changed the ground rules of medieval disciplinary methodologies. Nichols and Cerquiglini were joined by Howard Bloch, Lee Patterson, Suzanne Fleischmann, and others in arguing that the living vernaculars of medieval Europe were not transparently available to systemization but full of a flux and rich opacity that required an approach different from the language study and editing, modeled on classical philological practice, that had been the bedrock of medieval studies. Nichols has since followed through on his own insights by tackling, with digital resources, the hugely opulent mess of surviving manuscript information. Bravely digitizing one-hundred-sixty manuscripts of one of the most popular vernacular Kunstwerke of the Middle Ages, Le Roman de la Rose, he has confronted the “radical contingencies” of the medieval text with new and fervid honesty about the magnitude of the task. Where our editorial forbears selected significant, hand-collected detail with often pugnacious confidence, we now gaze at the overwhelming mass of information made easily available by digital photography and shrug expressively. The essays ranged here by German and American scholars, in homage to Nichols and his cohort of new materialists, new philologists, new medievalists, are strong and ambitious attempts to revisit the twenty-year-old call for methodological reinvention. Their most powerful legacy is perhaps threefold: we now understand that medieval studies needs to remember and foster its double Anglo-American and continental heritage; it needs to remember its basis in interpreting manuscripts and language; and it needs to speak directly to our present and our futures. Postscript: One virtue that, ironically, this volume does not possess (although it has many) is accuracy in proofreading. Numerous minor textual errors culminate in the mysterious ascription to Bloch of a chair at Columbia. He teaches at Yale.