Fiction and History in England, 1066–1200 (review)

I can remember my sense of intellectual excitement as, Ph.D. just in hand, I read the presidential address of James C. Holt to the Royal Historical Society published in its Transactions (32 [1982]). His topic was family history read through the colonialism of the Norman Conquest: "England [of 1066] was a colonial country, a notion which Englishmen find difficult to grasp, because on this occasion they were on the receiving end . . . " (pp. 205–6). Holt was gently prodding scholars of twelfth-century England to think historicity together with a traumatic colonial kernel in all of its intersecting, overlapping, and contaminating messiness. His proposal, so suggestive then, seems so obvious now in 2008, thanks to the energetic unfolding of postcolonial medieval studies over the past quarter-century. Such studies have troubled received notions of colony, nation, sovereignty, race, ethnicity, gender, genre, periodization—indeed, historicity itself. However, in the process of its institutionalization in the academy, postcolonial medieval studies has tended to narrow down on questions of identity politics measured by indices (most notably, language, genre, law) and to map on time-lines the vicissitudes of Normanitas, Englishness, Celticness. Depending on the chosen index, scholars calibrate the consolidation of Englishness in the aftermath of the Norman invasion back and forth along such timelines (1130 being an early calibration). Laura Ashe marks 1170 as the chronological point at which a weak Normanitas fades away and Englishness triumphs. Such timelines condense rich research agenda and render them comprehensible at the same time that they flatten postcolonial medieval studies into a normalizing representation of continuity and change. Time-lines of this sort unfortunately cut through the time-knots that Dipesh Chakrabarty has conjured so eloquently in his study, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000): "What I have called subaltern pasts may be thought of as intimations we receive—while engaged in the specific activity of historicizing—of a shared, unhistoricizable, and ontological now. This now is, as I have tried to suggest, what fundamentally rends the seriality of historical time and makes any particular moment of the historical present out of joint with itself " (pp. 112–113).

The sophisticated and ambitious book by Ashe illustrates this historicist aporia in postcolonial medieval studies. In provocative moves based on formal analysis and ideological critique influenced by Slavoj Žižek, the author questions some of the essentializing tendencies sedimenting recent studies of Englishness and Normanitas—post-1066. First, Ashe finds the language thesis (measuring the consolidation of Englishness with the emergence of English as a national language) too narrow and argues expansively for the inventive fabrication of Englishness in insular French texts. Further, based on formal genre analysis, she seeks to show how the French verse chronicle of the civil war of 1173–74 composed by English cleric, Jordan Fantosme, converges on the insular historical romance, Roman de Horn, thus questioning any easy essentialization of insular history and fiction based on genre. Finally, and crucially for her argument, Ashe locates the ideological development of English Common Law as the productive hinge of Englishness: "Normanitas proved to be a surprisingly weak as an export to England" (p. 7) and submitted itself to the territorial imaginary of an emergent English Common Law.

Ashe opens her complex study with an important methodological example of her critique of ideology. She reads the Bayeux Tapestry and argues that it performs what Žižek terms the ideology of the real. Englishness and Normanitas are not given in advance as categories to the embroiderers; instead, the tapestry stitches "history as it really was" and the "things that the matter" (p. 45). Invasions happen and the tapestry poses the question (a formal interrogatory beloved by the Marx Brothers in contemporary iterations over tea and coffee): "English or Norman? Yes please!"

What concerns me about the ongoing political engagement of postcolonial medieval studies is the fact that Ashe offers only half of the ideological critique proposed by Žižek, her theoretical guide. An analysis of the real, he insists, also needs...