Ancient Privileges: Beowulf, Law, and the Making of Germanic Antiquity by Stefan Jurasinski (review)

REVIEWS 243 The final chapter “Experiments of Colors” concerns romance, just as the first chapter did. Chapter 9’s focus, however, is Margaret Cavendish’s sense of romance. Famous for publishing the first scientific work by a woman, Observations on Experimental Philosophy, Cavendish also wrote romances like The Blazing World. In her empirical work, Cavendish maintains that black men are as different from white men as cows are from lions—that black men, in fact, are not descendants of Adam. But in romances like The Blazing World, she imagines men with skin colors that span the rainbow: not just variations of brown but blue, red, and green as well. Iyengar argues that Cavendish’s people of many colors is “a romantic reply to the emerging pseudoscientific discourse that did connect color with race—and the residual humoral discourse” that read skin color as a sometimes visible representation of a person’s humoral balance. Such egalitarian multiplicity, however, is confined to the realm of fiction. Shades of Difference uses a wide range of early modern texts that reach across many genres, creating a richly textured discussion. Iyengar puts texts into conversation with each other in ways that acknowledge the complexity of early modern mythologies of skin color and race while illuminating powerful sites of confluence or contestation between them. Overall, this is a very useful scholarly offering. LOREN BLINDE, English, UCLA Stefan Jurasinski, Ancient Privileges: Beowulf, Law, and the Making of Germanic Antiquity (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press 2006) 183 pp. The relations between law and literature (or literary studies) have long been held to be part of a new burgeoning field in the humanities. Especially with regards to Anglo-Saxon studies, the questions of how to read law as reflected and refracted through the lens of literature, and of how to read literature as informed by the legal issues of its contemporaneous times of production, are particularly prescient ones which unveil the critical strands of thought informing the predominant nineteenth-century scholarship on the Beowulf poem found in the work of Germanic philologists such as the Grimm Brothers, Father Klaeber , and Heinrich Brunner. As Stefan Jurasinski claims in this recent groundbreaking study of law, legal institutions, and their treacherous relationships with Anglo-Saxon literature as mapped out by various nineteenth-century scholars, this legacy of nineteenth-century scholarship did not in any way prove to be defunct, but continues to be the philological predecessor to an incipient trend of bellicose nationalism within twentieth-century criticism of the poem. Jurasinski himself provides his own gloss to the legal-ideological-historical issues surrounding this body of secondary criticism by asserting that the Beowulf -poem became crucial to the reconstruction of the primitive Germanic legal system even despite the denials of contemporary scholarship. He takes immense effort to narrativize this critical trend in Beowulf scholarship towards seeing the poem as a historical artifact more than a literary document, as well as the ensuing attempts to reconstruct the legal frameworks informing the poem’s construction. An immediately commendable effect of this study is to call attention to the blind spots which ironically inform the work of Grimm, REVIEWS 244 Klaeber, and Brunner, and which subsequently have left a wake of influence even in the work of twentieth-century Beowulf scholars. The scholarly tradition known as the historische Rechtsschule, founded by Jakob Grimm and Wilheim Eduard Wilda in the early nineteenth century, constitutes one particular blind spot in Germanic philology, as Jurasinski suggests , where Grimm claims in his Deutsche Rechtsalterthümer that Germanic law had been preserved via means of oral formulas such as Old English verse. Although largely forgotten now, it formed the backbone of most nineteenthcentury literary scholarship and legal historical work as a means of studying Germanic legal antiquities. To use the Beowulf poem as an artifact containing a treasure-trove of Germanic antiquities was a system based upon an extraordinary amount of faith on the part of Grimm, Kemble, Brunner and their philological heirs, in the immutable and timeless qualities of custom, as well as its invariable nature across the board of various Germanic tribes and communes. A study of the various assumptions concerning the poem’s affirmations of Germanic legal...