Confession and Resistance: Defining the Self in Late Medieval England by Katherine C. Little (review)

REVIEWS 251 the nameless lady, who exhibits a striking degree of bilingualism, combined with the desperate filiation amidst hybridity of this early prose romance (that ends in the assumption of Saladin into European genealogy) are all, Kinoshita argues, markers of a postcolonial text articulating the destabilization of cultural contact, designed to unbalance in literature what is rapidly unbalancing among Franco-Flemish nobles. “Uncivil Wars,” the seventh and final chapter, reveals one aspect of such crises via the anonymous continuation of La Chanson de la Croisade Albigeoise . Kinoshita allows this Occitan chanson de geste to speak for itself, which is, in some ways, to speak in response to the Roland; the numerous quotations reveal, with only the necessary prodding, the disintegration of paratge, loyalty culture governed by filiation and the rights of the nobility, against the machinations of the French King and Innocent III, and the cruelty of the crusaders. The Albigensian Crusade in southern France, and the “hybrid text” that details it, mark one final rupture in the movement of notions of difference and colonialism that Kinoshita traces (201). Medieval Boundaries is undeniably well written, informative, and necessary. The promise of the first section’s commitment to providing new models of reading medieval works in a postcolonial vein is fully realized by the second and third sections: indeed, the second section’s title, “Romances of Assimilation ,” may indeed hint at the project of assimilation of contemporary theories into a multifaceted method of reading that joyfully succeeds in “recast[ing] the contours of some of our most familiar images of the period” (7). The dual emphases on crisis and genre (specifically, vernacular genre) in the third section “casts the early thirteen century as a moment of epistemic rupture, in which several key twelfth-century institutions, practices, and mentalities were, in relatively short order, reorganized, challenged, or abolished” (2). Throughout, Kinoshita’s scrupulous attention to both text and context solidify her important and engaging claims. It is difficult to find flaws in such a well-reasoned account of both Old French literature and the modern critical discourses that inform our reading of it. I quibble slightly at the only occasionally useful genealogical tables, some of which are merely gestured to in the text itself (the notable exception is chapter 6, where they are quite necessary). Oddly, the bibliography, while extensive, does not include all of the works cited in the notes; however, a full citation is available in the notes for the works missing from the bibliography. Medieval Boundaries will be accessible even to the non-specialist, sometimes to a fault, as the medievalist will wonder if, for example, translatio imperii needs to be defined—although if the only fault is found in the surplus and clarity of relevant information, it is easily forgiven. KATHERINE MCLOONE, Comparative Literature, UCLA Katherine C. Little, Confession and Resistance: Defining the Self in Late Medieval England (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press 2006) vii + 196 pp. Over the last couple of decades the Wycliffites and their writings have come into vogue among scholars, who have generated a vast body of work discussing their heretical demands, as well as their place in the political and religious fer- REVIEWS 252 ment of the end of the fourteenth century and the beginning of the fifteenth. Katherine Little enters this scholarly discourse with the contention that Wycliffites were concerned with challenging not only doctrinal orthodoxy, but also the accepted language of lay instruction and auricular confession dating back to the Fourth Lateran Council. Indeed, Little identifies confessions as much as “a means to instruct laity in the requirements of belief” (5) as a sacramental performance. Little focuses on the coercive force of such instruction, predicated on the power of discourse, and particularly of narrative discourse, to shape subjects. Crucial to her argument, however, is the possibility of choice in this formative process, the possibility of resistance. In order to maintain this divergence from Foucault’s understanding of subject formation, Little uses the term “self-definition” with the insistence that the formation of the subject be understood as “a constant negotiation between the historical forces that shape the self and the choices that one makes” (12). The Wycliffites, she argues...