Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe ed. by Michael A. Signer, John Van Engen (review)

REVIEWS 205 she sets herself. She must find ways to prove that these written sequences consciously (and the imbuing of intention is key here) develop an authorial subjectivity that becomes identified with the “I” of the poems themselves. In the cases of Dante and Petrarch, whom Holmes discusses toward the end of the book, making this argument is less daunting for historical and structural as well as thematic reasons. For earlier poets such as Uc de Saint Circ, Guittone d’Arezzo, or Rustico Fillippi, let alone for “anonymous,” Holmes’s claims of authorial intent become much more difficult to defend. As a result, Holmes relies upon lexical and thematic connections among poems, along with biographical information that she then corroborates through references within the sequences themselves. Because she only rarely provides any poem in its entirety , these discussions seem pedantic and fragmented. Holmes also tends to summarize rather than analyze the poetry in order to support her more general claims for cohesive narratives and subjectivities. The results are long descriptive passages that provide broad generic readings of the sequences’ narratives and, at the same time, close readings focusing on repeated words and phrases in poems to which the reader never has access. Instead of proving that these poets construct identities one gets the distinct sense that Holmes is constructing them herself rather than letting the poet and the poetry speak of and for themselves. An investigation of authorial subjectivity is no mean feat. And the question of when a sense of “self” first arises, at least as we currently understand it, is the topic of lively and extensive debate among historians, critics, and philosophers . Holmes may be right in her claim that the concept of the “author” as a distinctive and constructed “self” emerges in late troubadour poetry, and that the very concept of the poetic sequence, when determined by the poet himself, serves as proof of this identity. Unfortunately, both the nature of these texts (the variants in sequencing, for example, or additions to or omissions from various manuscripts) and the more contemporary question of theoretical vocabulary get in the way of Holmes’s argument. While Holmes succeeds in her goal of emphasizing continuity in the development of lyric sequence, her greater claim, that “the advent of historical selfhood” coincides with “the construction of the modern figure of the author in lyric sequences” (3) prompts more disputation than resolution. CHERYL GOLDSTEIN, Comparative Literature, UCLA Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe, ed. Michael A. Signer and John Van Engen, Notre Dame Conferences in Medieval Studies 10 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press 2001) xi + 380 pp., illus., maps. How does a medievalist determine the importance of religion in the development of medieval social history? On the one hand the answer to this would seem obvious. Since there was no “secular” society, the Middle Ages exist as a “religious” culture, that is to say a culture that is bound up and identified with religious institutions. (This identification should be distinguished from “religiosity ” which deals specifically with individual praxis and devotion rather than hegemony.) On the other hand, however, there is a certain kind of transparency in many historical accounts, a taking for granted of the significance of religious identity in medieval Europe. This becomes clear when one realizes that Jewish medieval history is separate from discussions of medieval history in general, a REVIEWS 206 formulation that takes Christianity as so thoroughly normative that we need not even speak its name. For the last decade or so some Jewish medievalists have found evidence in texts about the First Crusade in 1096 written by JewishGerman pietists (Hasidei Askenaz), for example, of what might be described as a “cross-pollination” of religious cultures. Analyses of these texts suggest significant levels of cultural interchange between medieval Jews and Christians, a kind of sotto voce dialogue of identity and power. Interest in this religious dialectic was certainly one of the factors that led to the conference at Notre Dame University and culminated in Jews and Christians in Twelfth-Century Europe, edited by Michael A. Signer and John Van Engen. The essays reflect what Van Engen describes as a relationship of “intimacy and distance...