Printing the Middle Ages (review)

Medieval studies in Britain began as a highly self-conscious effort to retrieve and preserve a culture that was already being regarded as—or constructed as—alien and difficult. Siân Echard quotes the preface (probably written by John Joscelyn) to the 1566 Testimonie of Antiquitie, which refers to the 'darke speech' of Anglo-Saxon writings. Even by then, this contrast between the 'darkness' of the medieval past and the light of the present into which early modern commentators were trying to drag it (or parts of it) was a common conceit. Hardwired into medieval studies, in short, is a deeply ambivalent attitude in which the desire to retrieve operates alongside a sense of near-irretrievable difference.

The resultant investment in the origin has meant that medieval studies has been slow to analyze itself, regarding the interrogation of its own founding assumptions as a distinctly secondary activity. As a discipline it was, until quite recently, still dominated by the assumption that the most important thing it could do was to go on retrieving those texts darkened by the passage of time and, through ever more refined editorial techniques, bring them into the light.

A string of recent publications, of course, has enormously altered this. Siân Echard's new book, an avowed 'study of the postmedieval life of medieval texts,' could be regarded in one of its facets as deriving from a tradition looking back to Allen Frantzen's landmark Desire for Origins (1990). It will no doubt also be viewed as belonging to what is increasingly called 'medievalism studies,' although (I think quite appropriately) it nowhere invokes that methodologically still somewhat confused branch of cultural studies. Echard's book is about investment in authenticity, the forms in which medieval culture comes down to us, and especially the way in which 'the mark of the medieval' is stamped on some of those forms.

She begins with an introductory consideration of representations of the medieval book, specifically via the printed tradition of Piers Plowman, suggesting that today 'we continue to grapple' with the problem that faced the first printers of medieval English texts in the sixteenth century: 'what does it mean to reproduce a medieval author (or text) in "his own shape and likeness"?' She goes on to examine the sixteenth-century retrieval of Anglo-Saxon texts, and what she calls 'the impulse to facsimile' (17), before turning to the very lively but largely neglected printed tradition of the two romances Bevis of Hampton and Guy of Warwick in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The third chapter looks at the fate of the Trentham manuscript of Gower's works, a late eighteenth-century transcription of it, and the edition of the Cinkante Balades produced by the elitist Roxburghe Club. Two final chapters consider the rapid rise of Chaucer for children in the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth, and then Froissart's Chroniques. The latter might seem out of place, were it not for a convincing demonstration of the way in which the Flemish-born French-speaking Froissart is made into an honorary Englishman.

Outlined schematically like that, the book might seem like no more than a series of case studies. And I do think it risks that, in that the two closing chapters come to seem quite self-contained, article-length chapters. They are followed, however, by a brilliant concluding chapter, entitled 'Coda: The Ghost in the Machine: Digital Avatars of Medieval Manuscripts.' Here, Echard begins by looking at the British Library's digitization of the Sherborne Missal and 'traces a reprise, a return to the impulse to facsimile' in the possibilities afforded by the new technology. This is a form of medieval studies which pursues the same old goal of retrieval and preservation and yet—as Echard crucially identifies—it does so in a fashion which suggests that readers of such facsimiles are not expected to read them. This, she notes, 'has been a problem for medieval texts for many centuries.' At a...