Medieval Mythography: From the School of Chartres to the Court at Avignon, 1177-1350 (review)

206 Reviews Parergon 20.1 (2003) Chance, Jane, Medieval Mythography: From the School of Chartres to the Court at Avignon, 1177-1350, Volume 2, Gainsville, University Press of Florida, 2000; cloth; pp. xxvi, 517; 38 b/w illustrations, 19 tables; RRP US$85.00; ISBN 0813017955. This dense and complex work has not been a pleasure to read and review. For one thing, it was not easy to understand. It is probable that the present reviewer should have had the integrity in the first place to disqualify himself from reviewing any work tinged with the vocabulary and mentality of post-modernism, when so much of the language lacks transparency and grace and exceeds his capacity to grasp it. What is somebody like myself to make of the following passage, not actually the author’s own work, but quoted with approbation on page 2? In a sense, the subject is constituted through an exclusion and differentiation, perhaps a repression, that is subsequently concealed, covered over, by the effect of autonomy. That subject is neither a ground nor a product, but the permanent possibility of a certain resignifying process, one which gets detoured and stalled through other mechanisms of power, but which is power’s own possibility of being reworked. It is not enough to say that the subject is invariably engaged in a political field; that phenomenological phrasing misses the point that the subject is an accomplishment regulated and produced in advance. And as such is fully political; indeed, perhaps most political at the point in which it is claimed to be prior to politics itself. Are there scholars, one wonders, capable of understanding this extraordinary manifesto? It is not Chance’s own work, of course, but she shows herself everywhere capable of equaling it, so that the reader may reasonably infer that she approves of both content and style, however we may choose to describe them. And so the book continues to its laborious end, a miracle of modern scholarly English, packed tightly with evidence of the author’s wide reading (of that fact there can be no doubt; but if only she had read more and written less!), and startling us with her major thesis which appears to be that ‘scholars working in the most conservative and least literary of genres covertly played out the meaning of new ideas [emerging in the context of Aristotelian philosophy and a tougher Christian stance against heresy] which were too dangerous to espouse publicly.’ The study covers the period from the School of Chartres to the papal exile in Avignon. It is claimed that ‘the story of mythography’ during this time ‘reflects the ever-increasing importance of the subjectivity of the commentator’. Reviews 207 Parergon 20.1 (2003) She makes her case well enough, linguistic difficulties aside, but despite the undoubted range of her learning there are gaps which undermine the reader’s confidence in her judgement. The Scholia Bernensia on Virgil, for example, are a hugely important source for mythology of a late antique provenance; these are inadequately dealt with and occasionally misunderstood or at least somewhat tendentiously employed (p. 446, n. 24). It is also naïve to list them in the Chronology (p. xxii) as the work of ‘Adanan [Adamnan] the Scot?’ Even with the question mark, the implication that the whole compendium is the work of one author is unacceptable in the light of current scholarship. In the same section ‘Philargyrius’ is listed as an early and important commentator on Virgil, even though there is no real argument for his existence and even though the commentaries ascribed to him are clearly attributable to several sources. Listing him with Servius, while failing even to mention the lost commentaries of Donatus, shows a somewhat skewed view of this important material which must be due to a want of understanding. Unfortunately the author’s Latin translations are not always reliable: vegetantem (p. 10) is a present participle used transitively; it certainly should not have been translated as ‘vegetable’. The rather unsatisfying verdict on this ambitious work has to be that its author is well read, thoughtful and intelligent, but not entirely reliable as to detail. Perhaps she has cast her net too...