How Soon Is Now? Medieval Texts, Amateur Readers, and the Queerness of Time by Carolyn Dinshaw (review)

In the preface of How Soon Is Now?, a New York Medieval Festival attendee’s awkward bathrobe costume catches Carolyn Dinshaw’s eye. Dinshaw reads the bathrobe not as a goofy mistake but as a strangely touching “medievalist act” that shows the interweavings of past, present, and future in the bathrobe’s accidental similarity to medieval designs (xii). A few pages later, Dinshaw interprets the 1984 song “How Soon Is Now?” by The Smiths as an investigation of the “temporal conundrum” of the fleeting present (2). With a start like this, readers can expect a book that artfully jumps the tracks of the usual monograph, and they are not disappointed.

How Soon Is Now? offers a provocative mix of analyses of medieval texts, examinations of their reception by amateur readers, theoretical investigations, autobiographical reflections, and calls for change in the academy. These elements are united by the central project of “claim[ing] the possibility of a fuller, denser, more crowded now” (4). On the one hand, the book identifies moments in medieval texts that depict the experience of living in a complex and multiple “now.” On the other, the book examines the personal engagements of amateur medievalists who have found comfort or distress in medieval literature’s odd temporalities. Dinshaw observes that both medieval texts and their later readers embrace “forms of desirous, embodied being … out of sync with the ordinarily linear measurements of everyday life” (4). Professional scholars, the book movingly asserts, have much to gain from affirming such queerly amateur experiences in their own work.

True to the book’s open-ended spirit, Dinshaw shapes her chapters not as “definitive models” but as “provocations” (5). Following the preface’s bathrobe anecdote, the introduction surveys theories of time’s multiplicity, analyzing the difficult nature of the present in the titular Smiths song alongside Aristotle’s Physics and Augustine’s Confessions. Dinshaw also notes the book’s debts to recent scholarship on temporality, queerness, and historicity. Dipesh Chakrabarty’s work stands out as an especially notable influence in the introduction and in subsequent chapters. Playfully reminding readers of the forgotten importance of the amateur, the introduction also discusses the founding figure of contemporary Chaucer studies, Frederick James Furnivall. Furnivall, Dinshaw observes, was himself regarded with suspicion by established scholars, and his many editorial projects were motivated by a desire to reach an audience of passionate amateurs.

Chapter 1 develops Dinshaw’s claim that medieval texts and their amateur readers can provide us with “a more capacious and positive sense” of the present (41). It dwells on “asynchrony stories,” medieval narratives whose present is malleable or plural. In particular, Dinshaw examines a monk’s slip into the future in the Northern Homily Cycle, the century-crossing Seven Sleepers of Ephesus from Caxton’s version of the Golden Legend, and the temporally adrift army of King Herla from Walter Map’s De nugis curialium. The chapter’s conclusion then points out a similar asynchrony in Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s adaptation of the story of the monk in his verse drama The Golden Legend, showing how “Longfellow enters into a temporally complex now through medieval poetry and prose” (68).

Time and politics cross paths in the second chapter, which dwells on the temporalities of empire and colony. Dinshaw tracks the role of time in The Book of John Mandeville, examining that text’s discussions of the Fountain of Youth and of Eden as examples of “curiosity and longing to experience another kind of time” (76). The second part of the chapter considers adaptations of Mandeville by nineteenth-century British bureaucrat-amateurs who riffed on “Sir John” to consider their own “eastern” moments. Andrew Lang, for example, wrote a faux-Middle-English letter to John Mandeville, correcting Sir John’s errors and informing him about the progress of the British Empire. In this “amateur medievalist...