Medieval Literature and Postcolonial Studies by Lisa Lampert-Weissig (review)

Lisa Lampert-Weissig’s study offers a rich literary and cultural context for understanding how medieval studies and postcolonial theory should be in dialogue and mutually inform one another. She deftly navigates recent critical trends, political movements, and medieval historical and textual examples. Her text weaves a narrative in which she invites both scholars of postcolonial theory and those who focus on medieval studies to engage in a dialogue about how these seemingly disparate fields are best when mutually informative. Unlike other studies, this book is designed for nonspecialists: both medievalists who may not specialize in postcolonial approaches and postcolonial scholars who have not yet considered the influence of the Middle Ages on their field. By engaging these scholars into discussion and reflection, this study provides an important and unique service and it challenges disciplinary and theoretical boundaries.

The first chapter, “The Future of the Past,” engages scholars from all areas by offering an overview of the ways in which medievalists employ postcolonial theory, and her overview specifically addresses issues of race, borders, globalism, and temporality. The first section of Chapter One not only outlines the broad categories at stake, it also effectively argues that these postcolonial issues have spurred a trend away from Eurocentrism in medieval studies. In the second section, Lampert Weissig adroitly formulates one of the central premises of her study, namely that medievalists have not theorized in response to postcolonial theory, but that they are actively engaged in shaping the field of postcolonial studies. She explains that medievalists have contested many of the fundamental theoretical concepts—such as Orientalism, nation and nationalism, and colonial history—to challenge scholarly inattention to how medieval culture is crucial to the underpinnings of the colonial endeavor. Chapter One thus makes the important claim that the medieval period is essential to understanding the foundations of colonialism, and it provides the theoretical groundwork for the textual evidence in forthcoming chapters.

Chapter Two, “Medieval Intersections,” moves away from substantial literature review and delves into a rich and varied body of textual analyses. Certainly the most engaging and compelling portion of the book, Chapter Two surveys a broad swath of medieval writings with an eye to engaging modern postcolonial theorists. The chapter opens, for example, by exploring how Mary Louise Pratt’s notion of “contact zones” may apply to the spaces in which medieval literature was created. Though Lampert-Weissig considers many of the terms of Pratt’s (and other postcolonial theorists’) analyses appropriate to medieval studies, she nonetheless argues that modern theories grounded in postenlightenment analysis should be refined in light of medieval readings (p. 55). As such, her move toward specific textual evidence is particularly rewarding. She begins with a comparative reading of the English and Arabic versions of “The Case of al-Andalus,” an Andalusian love poem of hybrid Arabic and Romance linguistic origins. According to the author, the poem’s place as a linguistic and cultural hybrid resonates with current scholarly debate over the political history of al-Andalus and its larger place within a history of Mediterranean encounter and domination. So, for example, she argues that “it is often physical artifacts that demonstrate most strikingly the relationships between cultures in the medieval European past, revealing cultural contact that is only recently being examined”; for Lampert-Weissig, literature offers one of the most accessible examples of these kinds of contact (p. 41).

In the second half of the chapter, Lampert-Weissig shifts her focus to England’s Norman past in her analysis of the twelfth-century Old French romance Guillaume de Palerme, a werewolf romance set in Siciliy. In this section, entitled “Norman Frontiers and the Twelfth-Century Werewolf Renaissance,” the author situates her reading of the “contact zone” within a richly developed and culturally and historically specific context of Norman Sicily. She carefully compares and contrasts the ways that Normans ruled their colonial holdings in England and Sicily to provide an important counterpoint to Caroline Walker Bynum’s claim that the text...