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Reviewed by:
  • Printing the Middle Ages
  • Stephen Knight
Siân Echard. Printing the Middle Ages. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008. Pp. xvi, 314. $65.00.

“Printing the Middle Ages” is a sweeping title, but readers alarmed at the prospect of a wide-ranging concept-based analysis of how mechanized communication might have reformatted medieval themes and images [End Page 331] will be relieved to know that most of this book is rigorously undertheorized, even undercontextualized. Its detailed and well-illustrated discussion of the use of Anglo-Saxon letters in early replica publishing is, for example, quite innocent of the notion of “The Norman Yoke,” or that the term and idea “Saxon” bore (however improbably) overtones of egalitarian justice that encouraged timid English liberals. The overview absences are compensated locally: in the first chapter, Anglo-Saxon letters are given detailed description and reproduction (the whole volume is finely illustrated). Then an inherently disconnected sequence provides chapters on the transmission of the stories of Sir Guy of Warwick and Sir Bevis of Hampton, in specific texts rather than historicized overview; the handling and valuing of Gower manuscripts, including by Lord Gower; juvenile Chaucer texts of the nineteenth century; the varying treatment of Froissart and his texts; and finally a “Coda” on modern electronic textualities.

Through this series, the intricate research on manuscript contents is full, gathering elusive data from libraries around the world, but reporting it rather than seeing cultural or political patterns. Some of the data are Eng Lit classical, like the Beowulf manuscripts, transcripts, and print facsimiles, but Echard also communicates cultural-studies detail from her own university's holdings of the Mary Haweis materials in a chapter on nineteenth-century juvenile Chaucers that deserves a title less offhand than “Bedtime Chaucer.”

The ambition of the book is limited. A central methodological move, signaled in the introduction, is toward reified book history, not full-text meaning: Echard speaks about how “sober scholarly editions and cleaned-up school texts of the post-war era certainly suggest a deliberate (if temporary and of course illusory) cultivation of text over the thingness of the book” (xv). Fetishizing-ness may seem part of the thing-ness implied, and this limitedly material approach has in fact already been avowed: “Each chapter has a particular text-object at its core” (xi).

This book-history limitation is itself limited. As we hear about the Trentham Gower transcript, or the Haweis children's Chaucers, we do not find the politically meaningful connections book history has shown itself capable of making since Benedict Anderson linked printing to nationalism. Rather, we share the object-focus that led aristocrats to treasure these objects. The post-William Morris interest in script and illumination is called a “nostalgic nod to handwork” (59). Actually it signified a resistance to dehumanized manufacturing processes and the [End Page 332] exile of craft values. Other opportunities to read texts in their formative contexts are missed. In a long and often well-detailed chapter on the varying reception of Froissart, we do hear, if briefly, about “medievalizing nationalism” in Scott (164) and, potentially more interestingly, in the American Sidney Lanier (193), but while Henry Newbolt's interest in this mode is noted, his major impact on the English curriculum and the turn-of-the-century English national myth seems quite unknown (195).

This text-as-object approach, where context is largely limited to peritext, induces some misreadings. Thomas Warton, the breakthrough historicizing medievalizer, is taken as the erroneous bore that the splenetic Joseph Ritson declared him in defense of his own insistent textualism. More misleadingly, the interest that Warton and (cited here only in the Sir Guy of Warwick connection) Thomas Percy had in the idea of the Gothic Germanic north as free from serfdom, Catholicism, and imperialism, lasting through Germanophile writers like Coleridge and George Eliot as an icon of European liberalism, is here belittled as “Chaucer as Teuton” and traduced as “Aryan” in 1940s terms (161).

This mix of a form of consumerist fetishization and a very limited reading of the political contexts is at best a way of transmitting to more illuminating analysts a set of sometimes intriguing details about texts and their receptions...

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