Review Essay: Reading the Past in Medieval Literature

The ancient past is very much alive in medieval studies, as these recent scholarly books can attest. All three make useful contributions to our understanding of key medieval authors from across various literary traditions and their complex relationship to the past. Perhaps most importantly, these books challenge us to remember that the past, like desire, is never dead—and the present is always inhabited by ghosts, of ourselves and others, whom we often would rather not see.

Each of these books seeks to enrich our understanding of seminal medieval European texts by looking more closely at authorial relationships to classical or early-Christian authority. Yet, each also moves beyond previous scholarship by showing the ethical implications to postmodern readers struggling with our own present-tense. Cox, for example, focuses on how medieval authors like Dante, Chaucer, and the Gawain poet engage in a continued model of supersessionism whereby "the 'old' becomes old in relation to the 'new,' and the new is implicitly accorded the right to define and legitimize the old" (5). Her argument in The Judaic Other in Dante, the Gawain Poet, and Chaucer extends translatio studii into an ethical realm heavily influenced by Levinas and Derrida. Edwards's argument focuses on desire but, like Cox, is also invested in the way the "new" attempts to supplant the "old": how Ovid and Augustine's influence helps medieval lovers in their attempt to escape the pull of desire and lost love. The Flight from Desire is widely comparative and its scope at times rivals the ambition of Icarus and Daedalus's flight (also one of the best discussions in the book, 56–58). This makes for an exciting journey that focuses our attention on the role of temporality in desire and medieval love literature. Desmond's book also explores Ovidian discourses of desire, but she is more concerned with the ethics of erotic violence that such discourse legitimizes when translated from a colonial Roman context to a medieval literary one. Attending to many of the same medieval texts that Edwards examines, Desmond relies on postmodern gender and queer studies theories to see how Ovidian erotics and disciplina can "invite an ethical reading at the same time that they belie the presence—and power—of textual violence in the disciplinary acts of interpretation" (9). Taken individually, these books add much to the critical conversation about desire, ethics, and medieval literature's engagement with the past. Collectively they show that, like the past, medieval literary study continues to be carefully historicized, theoretically nuanced, and relevant to how we understand our own performance of postmodern identity.

Exploring "Christianity's fear of the Other who is and yet is not the Same" (23) and how it undergirds medieval literature, Cox does a fine job of balancing postmodern theory with close textual reading of exegetical and literary traditions. Her first chapter, "(Re)Figurations of the Judaic," establishes how the Old Testament becomes subordinate to the New Testament, even as it remains essential to the privileging of the Christian subject over the Judaic Other. Such typological hermeneutic is not without a cost, as she shows typology itself affirms Judaic tradition only to build a new Christian sacrality that subsequently "erases" the legitimacy of Jewish history and confirms its alterity. The rest of the chapters explore this dualistic practice in several canonical works from the middle ages and, in the book's epilogue, both the early and postmodern periods. Within these chapters one finds not only compelling assertions but surprising connections between various depictions of Otherness and poetic uncertainty.

Cox explores, for example, the "apparent absence of Jews" in Dante's Commedia by peeling...