Revivalist Fantasy: Alliterative Verse and Nationalist Literary History by Randy P. Schiff (review)

Revivalist Fantasy: Alliterative Verse and Nationalist Literary History issues a smart and necessary challenge to Alliterative Revivalism, the nineteenth-century theory that fourteenth-century Middle English literary production was shaped by nativist poets who resurrected the Old English alliterative line in order to compete with the French-influenced syllabic poetry of southern poets like Geoffrey Chaucer. To Revivalists, this ultimately failed resurrection signals the death of a Neo-Saxon medieval nationalism, yet fuels the life of a protomodern, Chaucerian nationalism. Finding no evidence for conscious competition between Chaucer and alliterative poets, Professor Schiff exposes the Alliterative Revival as “a medievalist rather than medieval phenomenon that originates from and continues to sustain Western nationalist interests linking British, American, and Continental scholars” (p. 2). His book demonstrates how this “monolithic narrative . . . blinds us to alliterative poems’ local contexts” (p. 2). Setting out to rescue this rich but marginalized body of work from Revivalism’s prescription of doom, Schiff proceeds to engage a range of exemplary alliterative poems in current critical conversations on transnational identity, gendered economic power, borderlands culture, and subversive communication networks.

The Introduction, “Alliterative Nationalism, from Modern to Medieval,” employs the work of Ernest Gellner and Benedict Anderson to delimit nationalism as an essentially modern phenomenon and to promote the imperial state as the preferable “analytic unit for late-medieval English and Scottish political history” (p. 8). Schiff emphasizes stable territorial boundaries and homogeneity in ethnicity, language, and culture as key factors defining modern national experience. Thus, his analysis diverges from the trend led by medievalists like Kathleen Davis, Kenneth Hodges, Patricia Ingham, and Kathy Lavezzo, who have sought to put concepts of nationhood into productive conversation with medieval texts. Schiff’s careful choice of the term “transnational” over “international” for this project works as an especially valuable intervention into our critical vocabulary. Insofar as the term internationalism expresses relation between comparable but discrete ethnic groups, nationhood would be its prerequisite. Schiff seems to recognize this problem and avoids internationalism’s implication of “a modern, static disposition of uniformly defined nation-states,” wisely taking a transnational perspective, “which enables our identification of networks of meaning that defy boundaries traditionally tied to nations” (p. 8). Interestingly, Chaucer’s “internationalism” has been one of the most commended aspects of his work. While Chaucerians who cite Chaucer’s internationalism have used it to mean something like cosmopolitanism, thereby seeking to distinguish Chaucer from nationalist writers and to link him with more universal values and traditions, internationalism is the word they use. Critics across the field of Middle English studies would do well to learn from and to follow this sharp move, regardless of individual positions on the viability of a medieval English nation. This is just one example of the rigorous analysis Schiff offers throughout.

The first chapter, “Beyond the Backwater,” begins with a riveting account of Alliterative Revivalism’s dangerous attraction to nationalism: critical history is seldom so captivating! Schiff records this history as the real national romance, suggesting that nineteenth-century critics, such as George Perkins Marsh, Hyppolyte Taine, and George Saintsbury, romanticized a national form that medieval poets did not. Schiff then begins to unravel the political aims of this poetry, which are diverse, yet exclude nationalism. Chapter One concludes with the debate poem Wynnere and Wastoure, arguing against editions as well as Revivalist readings that would relegate the richly ambiguous poem to the simple categories of literal historicism and nostalgic nationalist propaganda.

The next chapter, “Cross Channel Becomings-Animal,” reads William of Palerne against its twelfth-century Old French source, Guillaume de Palerne. Here the “primacy of late-medieval social status” and its intelligibility across national lines preclude any viable sense of national identity (p. 49). Schiff engages Giorgio Agamben’s homo sacer figure, Pierre Bourdieu’s analysis of ritualized social passage, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s understanding of animals’ roles in the production of social...