Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature by Lee Patterson (review)

REVIEWS texts edited in the Patrologia latina and Middle English texts edited for the Early English Text Society, and secondary sources, scholarly studies of the Cursor mundi and related matters. Thus the volume appeals more to the literary, historical, or theological scholar than to the textual critic or dialectologist. The list of sources, explanatory notes, and bibliography clearly and admirably delineate the various biblical, apocryphal, theological, and homiletic traditions that inform and enrich this Middle English poem, making it (as stated on the cover of the edition) "a traditional narrative ofgreat interest to the medi­ aeval reader ofbiblical paraphrases in the vernacular." JAMES R. SPROUSE Campbell University LEE PATTERSON. Negotiating the Past: The Historical Understanding of Medieval Literature. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. Pp. xiv, 239. $15.95 paper. In the short time since its publication, Negotiating the Past has already become an important manifesto, so that it almost demands a retrospective rather than a review. Not since D. W. Robertson's Preface to Chaucer(1962) or A. C. Spearing's Criticism and Medieval Poetry (1963) have the very grounding assumptions of our field been so thoroughly challenged. The book is organized into three parts. Part 1, "Historicism and Its Discontents," contains two essays on the history ofmedieval literary study. Chapter 1 traces the continuing impasse ofthe chiefinterpretative models for Middle English literary study, New Criticism and Historical Criticism, back through a series of virtually political oppositions since the birth of academic study ofmedieval literature in the nineteenth century. Victorian medievalism itselfbroke into opposing camps, one nostalgicfor the author­ ity of medieval institutions, the other taken with the local freedom from totalization that medieval society seemed to offer, one devoted to the collection of antiquities for their own sake, the other influenced by the techniques ofpositivist historicist scholarship. The obvious contradictions in these sympathies replicate themselves in the work of the fathers of AmericanChaucer scholarship, devoted on the one hand to the massing of historical knowledge impelled by the effort to reconstruct the period and 267 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER on the other engaged in literary appreciation apparently divorced from such scholarship. The New Criticism, argues Patterson, addresses this division by reading medieval literature as a dramatization of its cultural material. Chaucer, for instance, becomes "a poet who persistently engages his readers in a debate between the straightforward imperatives of cultural and religious authority on the one hand, and on the other, the irreducible complexity of lived experience" (p. 20). Historical location, that is, is subsumedto apparently transhistorical idealvalues, particularly those that support the development ofindividual freedom and the representation of individual character. Despite its apparent concern with historical fidelity, argues Patterson, the refusal to consider its own historicity condemns "exegetics" to a poten­ tially damaging marginality. Exegetics consciously rejects the pragmatic and generally empirical tradition ofAnglo-American criticism in favor of a totalizing Germanic Geistesgeschichte and French iconographic analyses. But exegetics assumes that the master text, usually but not always the patristic source, both means and knows what it says and itself requires no interpretation. In rejecting the "humanist hermeneutics of depth," ex­ egetics severely restricts the range of its own possible interpretations and thus exhausts itself rapidly. Chapter 2 surveys the current options, especially Marxist and New Historicist historicizing projects, and ironically finds in them the mirror image of the paralyzing totalization of conservative exegetics. For Patter­ son, the way out of this impasse is an awareness of the problematic historicity of our own field, so that, seeing where we came from, we can figure out where to go. Part 2 examines editorial principles and contempo­ rary hermeneutical evidence and part 3 the historical consciousness of medieval narratives themselves, presumably as ways of initiating such a survey. Part 2, "Inventing Originality," contains two well-known articles, both revised here, one a defense of the Kane-Donaldson Piers Plowman, the other, "Ambiguity and Interpretation: A Fifteenth Century Reading of Troilus and Criseyde." Printed here together, the two chapters make a cogent point: that the nearly collaborative creation ofmeaning by editorial and medieval interpretative commentary can be seen to have a politics as well as a history, so that the apparently objective processes of both enter­ prises...