The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War by Susan Crane (review)

REVIEWS Chaucer’s liking for creatively challenging engagements both with diverse sources and the author-audience relationships. Reading Correale and Hamel’s Sources and Analogues alerts us to the changes in sixty years not just in the advance of new research (and the decline in students’ and critics’ perceived ability to deal with foreign languages), but in the completely changed critical world. The rehabilitation of The Decameron, to take an obvious example, depends more on a readiness to shift away from focus on ‘‘literal’’ sources to more broadly ‘‘literary’’ ones, as Helen Cooper says (p. 2), than any new certainty over its direct influence on particular passages by Chaucer. This first volume of Sources and Analogues is a major resource for Chaucerians and Volume 2 will be eagerly awaited. Helen Phillips Cardiff University Susan Crane. The Performance of Self: Ritual, Clothing, and Identity During the Hundred Years War. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Pp. ix, 269. $49.95 cloth, $19.95 paper. This thoroughly engaging and learned book takes as its subject the social identities of courtiers in late medieval England and France. Starting from the premise that identity is both material and conceptual, the book turns to an impressively wide variety of evidence—lyric poetry, household accounts, chronicles, visual representations, and more—as support for its central claim that courtiers construct themselves ‘‘by staging their distinctiveness’’ (p. 2) in such performances as feasts, tournaments, entries , and other rituals, which display their elite status. With its perceptive and original readings informed by judicious recourse to theory, this book makes a major contribution to the history of identity-formation and to our understanding of late medieval writing and culture. The strategically limited scope of the book is one of its many strengths. Crane focuses on courts and courtiers in part because that is where the evidence is most abundant: visual and written records of the ceremonies, rituals, and entertainments of that elite stratum of medieval society exist in sufficient numbers to make possible a fairly dense reading of their functions. But she is motivated by more than the merely PAGE 375 375 .......................... 10906$ CH11 11-01-10 13:59:31 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER pragmatic: her decision to focus on courtiers aims to extend the usual range of cultural studies to take in not just those over whom power is enforced but also those who wield power. The temporal span of the book is chosen with similar astuteness: the long Hundred Years’ War, from about 1300 to 1450, is a period that Crane rightly judges to be especially ripe for exploration of the intertwined identities of French and English elites. As the subtitle suggests, the role of ritual and clothing in shaping identities is a central concern of the study. While the two might not at first glance seem particularly compatible, they make a logical pair in this study given Crane’s insistence that in medieval contexts, public appearance (which includes both dress and ritual) does not falsify identity, as modern social thought tends to assume, but establishes it and forms a part of the ongoing process identified by postmodernism with the construction of the self. As Crane asserts: ‘‘Living in the externally oriented honor ethic, secular elites understand themselves to be constantly on display, subject to the judgment of others, and continually reinvented in performance’’ (p. 4). She views rituals—and the costumes that courtiers wear in them—as ways of performing identities that are in turn made meaningful through the act of performance. Another of the book’s strengths is the remarkable breadth of its primary sources—some as well known as Joan of Arc’s cross-dressing, others as obscure as the personal signs exchanged in the marriage negotiations of Richard II and his second wife, Isabel—which are contextualized within other contemporary discourses and are approached from the vantage point of insights offered by modern social theory. To cite just one example, the 1393 banquet in which a group of courtiers costumed as wild men caught fire is read through the lens of illustrations and contemporary accounts and is juxtaposed with the Green Knight’s enactment of a courtly wildness. Compact and deft...