Incest and the Medieval Imagination by Elizabeth Archibald (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ventures have been to our enterprises over the past quarter century, and how we will need to respond as creatively to new economic and technological circumstances. John M. Ganim University of California, Riverside Elizabeth Archibald, Incest and the Medieval Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Pp. xv, 295. $70.00. Elizabeth Archibald’s literary history of the incest motif in medieval romance and exempla is a welcome survey of a subject paradoxically most discussed and most taboo in both the medieval and modern eras. In clear and often witty prose, Archibald’s book provides excellent coverage of medieval incest tales, as well as their classical forebears and early-modern cousins. As a result, this book will be especially useful to those in need of a literary context for single incest narratives or a collection. In her introduction, Archibald states the purpose of her study: ‘‘I think of my project as a literary archaeology, and I hope that other literary critics will build on the foundations I have excavated, using whatever approach they find most useful, just as historians build on the fieldwork of archaeologists’’ (p. 2). While Archibald hints that others may bring theoretically informed readings to the tales she unearths, she herself eschews the use of psychoanalytic or anthropological methods as anachronistic. For the most part, Archibald succeeds in sustaining her desired distance from theoretical entrenchment, and even though a strong focus of the book is ‘‘the representation of women in medieval incest stories’’ (3), neither does she place herself in a single camp of feminism. Some will think this repudiation of postmodern theory a strength in that it allows for an objective, thorough presentation, and others a weakness in that it does not foster in-depth analysis of the literature. Archibald’s own readings rely on formalist cues that identify patterns in incest narratives throughout the medieval era and beyond. Before a discussion of the popular incest narratives, Chapter 1 reviews ‘‘Medieval Incest Law: Theory and Practice’’ (p. 9). Archibald presents a lucid, extensive history of the changes in incest law from the classical period through the middle ages. Employing law codes—civil and eccle344 ................. 10286$ CH15 11-01-10 13:54:49 PS REVIEWS siastical—as well as penitentials, she traces the early evidence that injunctions against incest are constructs of culture rather than reflections of natural revulsion. For example, she explains the laws against intercourse with affines, such as godparents, as a reflection of the Roman Catholic Church’s conception that all people are brothers and sisters in Christ. In this chapter, Archibald chronicles well the extension of incest laws under eleventh-century clerics who were zealous about church power and issues of chastity, and the relaxing of these laws under the burdens of enforcing them. While James A. Brundage’s Law, Sex and Christian Society in Medieval Europe stands as the classic work in English on this subject, Archibald’s survey is still incredibly useful for its sharp focus and distillation of a variety of legal and moral texts into a reasonably short chapter. Students of the middle ages to whom this topic is new will enjoy an immediate familiarity with the most important questions and determinations on incest during this period. Most of the fine points of medieval incest law dwell on defining this sin and determining to which degree of consanguinity sexual relations are incestuous. As the eleventh-century churchmen mandated, is intercourse with almost any family member immoral and illegal? Or as the Fourth Lateran Council proposed, is a prohibition to the fourth degree sufficient to promote chastity and exogamy? Archibald herself notes that in contrast to ecclesiastical discussions, popular literature is hardly at all interested in cousin marriage or the spiritual pollution of sleeping with a member of one’s godparent’s family. Instead, popular medieval exempla and romance portray more often than not parent-child or sibling incest. Archibald posits ‘‘Perhaps one reason why popular medieval incest stories almost always deal with nuclear family incest is that in these cases there can be no argument about the severity of the sin, or the need to regularize the situation’’ (p. 50). While this may be...