Fama: The Politics of Talk and Reputation in Medieval Europe (review)

The editors of this collection of essays propose that "words ... that have wide semantic fields are usually doing important things within a culture." Their example is fama, which can mean not only fame but "public opinion, idle talk, rumor, and reputation" (10). Consequently, the nine essays published in this volume are interdisciplinary as a group, treating law (Chris Wickham, Thomas Kuehn, F.R.P. Akehurst, and Jeffrey Bowman), literary texts (Lori Walters, Richard Horvath, and Edwin Craun), manuscript illumination (co-authors Madeline Caviness and Charles Nelson), and social history (Sandy Bardsley). Nevertheless, most of these contributions are hardly interdisciplinary when taken by themselves but straightforward contributions to legal or literary history. If itispossible to see from the aggregate how the implications of fama anditscognates were multivalent, that point was reasonably obvious from the start. Hence, it is difficult to imagine many readers wanting toapply themselves to detailed analyses, for example, of both Visigothiclaw (Bowman) and fourteenth-century Middle English romances (Horvath).

The two most internally interdisciplinary essays represent poles of methodological weakness and rigor. The one by Caviness and Nelson treats attitudes toward women in an illuminated fourteenth-century manuscript of the Sachsenspiegel, a handbook of German customary law. In principle, it ought to be an examination of the interplay between text and image as a combined message for the legal practitioner, because text and image are obtrusively keyed to each other in the manuscript. But the authors unapologetically opt for favoring the image on the grounds that "the paintings assert themselves more aggressively" (50). Even if that assertion is true, there surely seems no reason to exclude generous access to the relevant texts to allow readers to decide for themselves. Indeed, in the present case, such a control seems particularly necessary because the authors' observations often seem either dubious or arbitrary. Moreover, the fact that a single illuminated Sachsenspiegel manuscript is examined even though three others are known to exist raises the question of whether this essay will well serve the authors' fama. In contrast, the essay by Bardsley on "Sin, Speech, and Scolding in Late-Medieval England" displays learning and finesse in interrelating religious, legal, and social history. The author draws on impressive research to trace the increase of prosecutions for a variety of speech crimes, to show how "scolding" was attributed primarily to women, and to posit ingeniously that the prosecutions can be viewed as a response by the ruling classes to threats against their status after the Black Death.