Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures ed. by Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Deanne Williams (review)

REVIEWS 284 carefully presented in print, while at the same time strategies were developed for controlling their public roles” (125). This chapter holds particular interest in light of the apparent prominence of Margaret Fell in the upper echelons of the Quaker movement. As part of this egalitarian view towards women, Peters argues that the Quakers sought to establish a universal participation in their new faith. In the final section of her book Peters brings the discussion into the realm of the political participation of the Quakers. She argues that “the early Quakers used print circulation, manuscript circulation, and public meetings and forums to bring to light the inadequacies of the English republic’s religious settlement” (194). The Quakers demanded legislative reform to address these inadequacies. The final section of the book ends with another case study, the James Nayler crisis in 1656. James Nayler was accused of attempting to appropriate too much authority and was ultimately officially charged with blasphemy. Nayler’s trial, according to Peters, and the Quaker reaction to it demonstrate the Quaker movement’s desire to achieve a religious settlement. The Quakers responded to the trial as a unified body, and the Quaker leader’s tightly held control over the print publications for the movement constituted an internal crisis that is exemplified by the trial and the reaction to it. Peters’s book offers valuable insights into the beginnings of the Quaker movement and the political and social ramifications of their use of the medium of print. Her use of primary source documents is to be commended here, as they aptly demonstrate her overarching thesis about the relationship between the Quakers and the printers. This book should be particularly interesting to anyone engaging in scholarship relating to the English Civil wars, as well as to anyone interested in learning more about the seventeenth-century book trade. Critics, although they may be few in number, who study the early Quakers will find this volume a useful explanation of the early movement and the associated attempts to spread its ideology. DAN MILLS, English, Georgia State University Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures, ed. Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Deanne Williams (Cambridge: Cambridge Univeristy Press 2005) xii + 298 pp., 15 figs. This collection of essays bridges postcolonial theory and medieval studies, offering an interdisciplinary compendium that focuses on the general theme of translation and its social, cultural, and political implications. While this book is not the first study to view the Middle Ages as postcolonial, as the authors acknowledge, it has the advantage of building on previous scholarship and, where appropriate, pointing to and mending the lacunae in recent works. Nevertheless, what this work and those before it share in common is the desire to reconfigure narratives that speak about the past, stressing multivalency and building on the foundations and theories of Homi Bhabha, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Edward Said. In conjunction with these postcolonial thinkers, Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages draws on other postmodern theories from fields as diverse as gender studies and anthropology. Its overall goal is to theorize translation as a new methodological tool and a way to broaden both our historical and theoretical scope. REVIEWS 285 The eleven essays in this book are contributions from scholars in fields as diverse as Art History, English, History, and Postcolonial Literary Studies. This range is necessary to overarching idea of the medieval period, whether it is geographic, cultural, or temporal (dis-)locations that are being addressed. Despite the breadth of topics and backgrounds, the book gives particular focus to the trope of translatio imperii et studii, an idea invented in the Middle Ages to describe the linear transfer of power/legitimacy and culture/knowledge from one civilization to the next, here from classical antiquity to the medieval period. The authors use this theme of translation “as a mechanism of and metaphor for cultures in contact, confrontation, and competition, but also as a means of rehabilitating wonder” (6). The theme of wonder, a common thread in the essays , is employed to discuss the forward impetus and dislocation from the past. The editors’ introduction opens with a meditative dialogue on an image of the Three...