Cultural Reformations: Medieval and Renaissance in Literary History (review)

This volume is the second in the “Oxford 21st Century Approaches to Literature” series. Like the first (Paul Strohm’s Middle English) Cultural Reformations contains essays written by established literary historians (e.g., Greenblatt on Thomas More) and newer voices, and aims at further breaking down periodization. The editors encouraged contributors to examine works either side of 1500 and suggest that ongoing squabbles about terms (‘medieval’, ‘Early Modern’, ‘Renaissance’) are ‘always half arguing about [modernity] anyway’ (p. 8).

The fruit of a 2008 Harvard conference is thus a timely contribution to debates about chronologies, histories, and modes pre/post-Reformation. Like Middle English, Cultural Reformations is divided into sections and papers grouped under dynamic, one- or two-word headings that seemingly encapsulate a concept (and also reflect current disciplinary fashions: no colons here!). While emblematic and engaging – e.g. ‘Anachronism’, ‘Conscience’, ‘Idleness’, ‘Persona’ – these do not always best reflect content, nor is it always clear what the link is between an essay’s title and its location in the volume.

In a collection of thirty-two essays, some groupings and papers will inevitably work better than others (and it is not possible to do all justice here). The section entitled ‘Labour’, for example, contains three essays which employ differing interpretations of the term and whose connections are not immediately obvious. Whereas the sections on ‘Histories’ and ‘Spatialities’ include essays whose conclusions may be extrapolated and more widely applied, those investigating ‘Communities’ and ‘Doctrines’ are more circumscribed. They seem even to be relegated to a lesser status in the volume’s structure, bookended by ‘larger’ – perhaps more ‘prestigious’ – historiographical or literary questions.

A number of essays are particularly enjoyable: Margreta de Grazia’s lucid ‘Anachronism’ rehabilitates Lorenzo Valla’s De falso credita et ementita Constantini donatione declamatio (1440), for example, debunking key contemporary scholarship to show that ‘It is not the forger’s anachronisms that incense Valla, but his barbarisms’ (p. 22). De Grazia reveals how the concept of anachronism has become a litmus test for some scholars, who identify the Renaissance ability to ‘detect’ it as proof of an emerging sense of historical differentiation. Jesse Lander’s subsequent essay on historiography neatly picks up where De Grazia leaves off.

Jennifer Summit, like a number of other contributors, unpacks a concept traditionally seen as signifying the divide between medieval and early modern: in this case, a perceived medieval preference for the vita contemplativa and the Renaissance focus on the vita activa. A number of scholars have argued that the latter is due to the rise of science as a discipline, but Summit takes Francis Bacon and Walter Hilton as evidence of how the two ideals were significantly more porous than neat divisions made for the benefit of chronology or discipline might suggest.

Andrew Hadfield’s essay on travel is also exemplary in its careful unpacking of the rapid developments in travel and changes in religious experience pre- and post-Reformation. Margery Kempe, he demonstrates, uses her travel experiences (of images or places) as a ‘means of perceiving her spiritual life’, while William Lithgow ‘sets himself at odds with external signs’ and locates his spirituality ‘within himself’ (p. 143). While wary and hypercritical of the popery of Rome, Lithgow is nevertheless open to religious plurality when he reaches Jerusalem, and seems to accept ‘a wider range of forms of devotion outside Europe than he would inside it’ (p. 146).

Hadfield is not alone in examining Kempe’s work, and one of the features of this volume is that while contributors theoretically have a very broad period of English literature and myriad writers to investigate, many discuss not only the same authors but also the same works. Chaucer (particularly his Nun’s Priest’s Tale) and More put in the most frequent appearances, but Kempe and Marvell (particularly ‘Upon Appleton House’) are not far behind. In...