Imagining a Medieval English Nation ed. by Kathy Lavezzo (review)

REVIEWS 245 that in particular women were the first to discover the concept even though men were responsible for its institutionalization (304). In sum, Helots and Their Masters in Laconia and Messenia is a wide-ranging exploration of various methods of research and interpretation. Most of the essays employ more than just literary evidence, such as comparative material or archaeological data, and this creates very thought-provoking discussions of the helots. Almost all the pieces touch on one or more of the key points of contention concerning helots, such as their origins, definition of their status, or the nature and impact of the institution. With its diverse approaches to ongoing debates, this collection would be particularly appropriate for a graduate seminar on Sparta or ancient slavery. It is unfortunate that no clear picture of the helots emerges, but as the editors acknowledge, “The last word on the Helots will never be spoken, and it is in the nature of the evidence that whatever is said about them has to be tentative, temporary, indeed controversial” (v). Nevertheless , this volume contributes greatly to a better understanding of what little we do know about Sparta’s servile population and certainly will provide a solid point of reference for the continuing study of helotry. NICHOLAS R. ROCKWELL, History, UCLA Imagining a Medieval English Nation, ed. Kathy Lavezzo (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 2004) xxxiv + 356. Did the concept of national identity exist in the Middle Ages? This is, in essence , the question with which this collection of nine essays chooses to wrestle. In order to explore such a complex problem in a relatively limited space the editor, Kathy Lavezzo, has chosen, for the most part, to focus discussion upon literature. This decision is nowhere clearer than in two of the five sections into which this volume is divided, Chaucer’s England and Langland’s England, but the theme is prominent throughout. As these two titles suggest, the collection also possesses a strict chronological focus, one which concentrates almost exclusively upon the second half of the fourteenth century and the reign of Richard II. Such self-imposed restrictions were undoubtedly a wise decision: The volume launches the odd chevauchée into the wider worlds of, most prominently , art and economics, but a broader approach would almost certainly have proved unwieldy. The first reaction of political theorists and historians whose work does not have a primarily literary focus may be a sense that the volume fails to live up to the promise of its title. While the addition of a subtitle would not have been unwise, most will find that, upon consideration, this collection offers an informative and varied perspective upon an important topic. As the editor points out in her introduction, historians of later periods are also likely to find something of interest here. In particular, the volume is a stringent refutation of the view of many modern historians that the “nation” was an invention of post-Enlightenment thought. Such a rebuttal is not, in itself, novel: As Thorlac Turville-Petre points out in his afterword, for most medievalists the idea that “the concept of national identity was available to writers in the fourteenth century ... [seems] undeniable” (340). However, as Lavezzo puts its, this collection aims to extend and complicate the arguments of Turville-Petre and others (xix). Overall, the volume succeeds admirably in its aim of pouring oil on Turville-Petre’s smol- REVIEWS 246 dering arguments and water on those of postcolonial writers such as Benedict Anderson. The approach of the latter, in particular, forms both the starting point and the target for many of the contributors.23 The first section of this volume, Theorizing the Medieval English Nation, contains one essay by L. O. Aranye Fradenburg. It is certainly possible to question Fradenburg on a number of specific points. Possibly the most notable example is her assertion that, “... increasingly dependent on the fighting forces of Christendom, the Church in turn produced sacralized warfare and lent its ritual power to the ‘ordaining’ of knights as though their ‘office’ were analogous to the priesthood” (7). If there is any truth in this, then it is almost certainly restricted to specific circumstances connected with the...