Archaeologies of English Renaissance Literature (review)

Philip Schwyzer does not want to speak with the dead but to touch them. He's read enough about tomb excavations, however, to warn us that the corpse is likely to turn to dust in the act of exposure. The very air of discovery will be the agent of final dissolution.

He reminds us how avid the desire for encounter, and how real the dangers of exposure, are for trophy mummies. Such figures as Ötzi the Iceman and Lindow Man pop in and out of Schwyzer's book as verifiable counterweights to the more readily dismissed fancies of the medieval excavations of figures like Arthur and Guinevere. The fate of these celebrity mummies supports Schwyzer's argument that preserved corpses impose a responsibility on their archaeologist-stewards. As he argues in chapter 1, relics have "a dual nature, as things in the present and as witnesses to the past" (26). For instance, an encounter with the quintessential bog body, known as Tolland Man, can be profoundly disorienting to one's sense of temporality. His expression is still so recognizably of the moment, his distress so compelling. These human remains, therefore, may refuse to be subordinated to our scholarly agenda. They may demand a dialogue on reciprocal grounds. In Schwyzer's view, archaeology and literary studies are especially well suited to undertake those reciprocal conversations. The two disciplines are "united by their shared intimacy with the traces of past life" (15) of human life, flesh, and blood, summoned to speak to and through us.

As Schwyzer describes it, there is also a good deal of overlap between the two discourses at the levels of theory, as well as in an increasingly shared interest in a historicizing materialism-one that traces the life cycle or trajectory of an object over time. Above all, literary analysis from Freud to Foucault is infused with the imagery of archaeological practice. That discourse, in turn, is shot through with a desire to read and even give voice to mute objects. This interpenetration of theories and methodologies is the dynamic space of investigation here. "Indeed," Schwyzer argues, "nothing is more common in each field than to invoke the other as a metaphor for its own practice" (6).

Chapters 2 through 6 explore a nexus of literary texts that take up or respond to objects unearthed, returned to the earth, repurposed, or commodified. Chapter 2 gets immediately to the heart of the ethical dilemma for archaeologists. It features a variety of texts and reports of exhumations of the conquered dead. Typically, such exhumations seek to sever the relationship of the conquered to their dead and hence interrupt and invalidate communal identities and claims to a land. The core examples reverberate with the genocidal massacre of native Britons by Anglo-Saxons as the foundational story of British history. That story, however, rests entirely on texts written centuries later rather than on material evidence. The archaeological evidence suggests, instead, that "some limited immigration from overseas coincided with or triggered the more widespread adoption of Germanic customs by local peoples" (42). In reports of medieval excavations and the narrative poem St. Erkenwald, the relics of Britons are discovered, but in each case they are then expunged as living connections with indigenous cultures. When the Tudors reclaimed the heritage of ancient Britain, the problem they faced as colonizers in Ireland was a familiar one-not so much "unruly inhabitants [as] unquiet ancestors" (65). Likewise, Spenser posits a violent solution in The Faerie Queene. But it is what Schwyzer characterizes as the antiquarian bent of A View of the Present State of Ireland that lays the groundwork for a pyrrhic English victory. In a harrowing description of famine victims (and the book's first consideration of cannibalism), Spenser describes the starving Irish eating each other. The land is thereby cleared for plantation. This makes way for what Schwyzer describes as the very first time "the earth of Ireland is heard to speak with an English voice" in...