The Middle Ages in Texts and Texture: Reflections on Medieval Sources (review)

This book presents a series of twenty-six insightful, short essays, each about a different medieval author or text, written to appeal to undergraduate students and their instructors. The editor and the authors, all former students of the University of California, Berkeley, benefitted from the enthusiastic teaching of Robert Brentano, who died in 2002. The collection has its beginnings in a series of sessions in Brentano’s honor at the International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo in 2002, an origin also reflected in the book’s dedication. It is hard to imagine the dedicatee, a popular teacher for young students, would be disappointed by this book. The essays are concise and digestible and offer students a variety of perspectives on approaching medieval authors and texts. As such, a few comments on each are in order.

After a brief foreword by Thomas Bisson, and an introduction by the editor, the volume opens with William North’s discussion of Augustine’s Confessions (7–19). North argues that by listening carefully to the role of voices and conversations in the work, we can appreciate the unity of books 1–8 and 9–13: the first are the story of conversations that lead to God, the latter the conversation with God. John McCulloh’s historical exegesis on the Vitae of Saints Antony and Martin would offer a student good background to approach other hagiography (21–32). Next, Judith Beall presents a compelling picture of how the “warrior ideal” found in Tacitus’s Germania and Beowulf comes to be Christianized in the Vita of Boniface (33–43). Turning to Merovingian Gaul, Sam Collins explores how Gregory of Tours works to show the role of divine providence throughout the jumble of his Histories, especially in his positive portrayal of clerics (45–55). By comparing the differing aims of two lives of St. Radegund (57–69), Jason Glenn offers an excellent model to students on how to compare two primary sources. The many features of the theological and phenomenological world of Gregory the Great’s Life of Benedict is next examined in high sophistication by the great Carole Straw (71–83), before we pass to Kathleen Casey’s brief on law codes and the ineffectiveness of written law in England before the Norman conquest (85–92). Jay Rubenstein explores how Bede, in his Ecclesiastical History, depicts the steady progress of Christianity and God’s continued presence in England, which may indeed owe its very name to Bede’s conception (93–104). Glenn’s second essay offers a well-turned argument for how Einhard’s biography makes Charlemagne into a very Frankish emperor, but using a framework drawn from Roman models like Suetonius (105–117). Bernard of Angers’s work on St. Foy, with its spirited defense of the rights of the church and its focus on spiritual reform, is contrasted with later, more parochial additions by more localized adherents by Kathleen Fung (119–128).

Entering the central Middle Ages, Rubenstein presents William of Poitiers using his legal, classical and theological training to make a case for the legitimacy of the Norman conquest in The Deeds of William, in an essay sure to appeal to an undergraduate student (129–140). Susan Millinger offers a “post-feudal” interpretation of the Song of Roland in an essay that aptly warns of the circular arguments that can result from relying on modern translations of medieval works (141–152). Galbert of Bruges’s Murder of Charles the Good forms the basis of Lawrence Januzzi’s sometimes overly abstract essay, which nonetheless contains an exemplary introduction on how to approach a medieval author (153–164). We see Odo of Deuil struggling, in Rudi Lindner’s essay, to comprehend Louis VII and the new world of twelfth-century religiosity in his De profectione (165–176). In one of the strongest essays in the collection, Helen Nader provides a compelling historical analysis of the poem of the Poema de Mío Cid, one that...