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  • Fictions of Evidence: Witnessing, Literature, and Community in the Late Middle Ages by Jamie K. Taylor
  • S. C. Kaplan
Jamie K. Taylor, Fictions of Evidence: Witnessing, Literature, and Community in the Late Middle Ages (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press 2013) x + 221 pp.

In Fictions of Evidence, Jamie K. Taylor treats the complex topic of the multiple forms and purposes comprised by the single term of “witnessing” in late medieval England. One of the challenges of Taylor’s premise, analyzing five different works—both literary and legal—and five different types of witnessing, lies in the sheer volume of contextual knowledge necessary to appreciate each author’s (and work’s) goal. Each chapter focuses primarily on one significant English text while providing the historical and literary background necessary to appreciate Taylor’s analysis. Although Taylor establishes Derrida and Levinas, among others, as her theoretical point of departure, the book does not provide an excessively theory-heavy reading, remaining accessible to the general scholar.

Chapter 1, which takes Chaucer’s Man of Law’s Tale as its primary example, deftly interweaves the necessary historical context with analysis of its application in the story’s portrayal of false witnessing. Taylor’s discussion of the role of the body in Constance’s story, primarily the body’s function as a witness and as something one can witness, is concentrated on Constance’s face and on the body of the crowd. Although Taylor signals how witnessing and especially false-witnessing can undermine sovereign earthly authority, leaving no recourse but to divine authority, I am not entirely convinced that she has shown how it brings the two of them back together. Rather, the divine seems to take precedence over the earthly, understandably, without ceding back the recognition of earthly sovereignty as a trustworthy entity.

The second chapter concentrates on the various iterations of the Susanna story and how their focus shifts from (false) witnessing to female chastity and obedience. One of Taylor’s particularly interesting claims is that the story “expands the definition of witnessing to accommodate distinctly female modes of testimony” (55). Equally interesting and left partially undeveloped (although she will address it in later chapters) is the tension between bodily witnessing [End Page 337] and documentation, since Taylor spends a great deal of time focusing on male authors’ documentation of Susanna’s silence (also interpreted as more powerful than an articulate utterance because beyond language) in contrast to the bodily (false) oaths sworn by the lecherous priests. The idea of the community formed during this witnessing process, ostensibly the focus of the book, receives substantially less attention here than in other chapters, leaving the reader unconvinced until the last few pages that these very interesting witnessing practices actually respond to community-shaping practices in fourteenth-century England. Eventually, however, Taylor effectively claims use of the Susanna story for the “assert[ion of] an alternative heterodox Christian community” (79).

In chapter 3, beginning with an exemplum in which God is made an outlaw, Taylor addresses the different registers of neighborliness in Christian, local and legal communities within the context of increasingly centralized legal authority. The difficulties in accommodating the different ideas of neighborliness—loyalty to someone who lives nearby vs. loyalty to one’s king, under whom all men are equal neighbors regardless of class—are well articulated, as are the problems pertaining to witnessing; that is, how witnessing contributes to one or the other of these communities, but not both. The problem lies in situating outlawry’s relationship to these neighbor communities. Outlaws can be conceived as either a long-term threat, or as people who will likely soon be brought back into the fold. They are also representative of a theoretical equality among themselves, though this equality is belied by their appropriation of the traditional hierarchical organizations of normal society. These paradoxical understandings of outlaws lead Taylor to question how the lack of witnessing in the first exem-plum pertains to our understanding of God as outlaw, wherein Taylor suggests that it could be read as that community having rejected royal authority and formed an outlaw community with God.

Chapter 4, which focuses primarily on Piers Plowman, lays out...

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