Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England ed. by Corinne Saunders (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER theorist once or twice and then darting back to trivia and smartness, Harwood shows how to develop a position, offer a new reading, and then actually present an account of the role and the representation of labor in the period. The collection could have done much more like this, using the real strengths of theory on the topic of labor: it is surprising that there is no ‘‘postcolonial’’ piece on workers as exploited social— even Saxon—indigenes, or indeed a piece on how laborers are so often ‘‘queered’’ as animals. Something at the appropriate theoretical level is offered in the final essay by William Kuskin. Occasionally slipping into elusive glibness, this is nevertheless a lively and interesting piece on how labor itself, especially in Caxton’s ambience, has diminishing visibility in the economically and representationally transitional stage of the late Middle Ages. This account helps to clarify that Marx’s allegorical treatment of the forces of economic politics in Capital is not just para-religious discourse , but a way of identifying what ideology had obscured. Curiously, Kuskin’s title, ‘‘The Erasure of Labor,’’ refers to what has happened in most of these essays, and in a number of ways that is for reasons related to the forces that he shows operating at the interface of social and technological change. Caxton’s printing press and the modern MLA are both sites of dissemination and obfuscation, both equally possessed by and productive of ideology. And just like the modern academic winter festival, this collection is full of detailed work (amazingly the footnotes occupy more than twenty percent of the book), a lot of unfocused rhetoric, some whispers of professional ambition; and yet there are, if you stick around and keep your concentration, a couple of pieces really worth your effort. Stephen Knight Cardiff University Corinne Saunders, ed. Cultural Encounters in the Romance of Medieval England. Woodbridge, Suffolk, and Rochester, N.Y.: D. S. Brewer, 2005. Pp. x, 193. $75.00. The biennial conference series ‘‘Romance in Medieval England’’ is fast approaching its tenth anniversary (in York in March 2006) and Cultural PAGE 328 328 ................. 16094$ CH17 11-01-10 14:05:20 PS REVIEWS Encounters, derived from the eighth conference held in Durham in 2002, is the sixth installment of what has become a regular series of essays on insular romance; a seventh volume, from the 2004 Dublin conference, is in production. The conference remit is wide—conventionally excluding Chaucer and Arthurian romances, including the Gawain-poet and Malory , in favor of the vast and rich corpus of noncanonical romance (metrical , alliterative and prose, in manuscript and print, in Middle English and Anglo-Norman)—and the research it promotes (like the volumes that it produces) is correspondingly diverse. Work on manuscripts, including textual variants and editorial practice , medieval and modern; on audience; on sources and recurrent motifs ; on Anglo-Norman texts; and on long-forgotten best sellers figure prominently in essays that are unabashedly specialized and often resistant to current critical trends. Some of the very best work in previous volumes in this series have justifiably become classics in the field— Jocelyn Wogan-Browne on romance and hagiography, Carol M. Meale on audiences, John J. Thompson on the medieval anthologizing process, Judith Weiss on wooing women—but the kind of theoretical pyrotechnics that have characterized recent American forays into English romance (in the work of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Geraldine Heng, and Vance Smith, for instance) is notable for its absence. Indeed it is not too much of an overstatement to suggest that the series bears witness to an increasingly entrenched continental divide. Not all contributors are British or even UK-based (although the majority are), but almost all (generalizations always invite refutation) favor a brand of scholarship that, despite the most recent volume’s up-to-the-minute title, is selfconsciously old-fashioned. Derek Brewer’s antipathy to the ‘‘bizarre attempt[s]’’ of ‘‘feminists such as Dinshaw’’ to ‘‘sexualise all human relationships ’’ (in this volume’s ‘‘Some Notes on ‘Enobling Love,’’’ a discursive tour of English romance in response to Stephen Jaeger’s recent book), much like his professed distaste for current fashion (‘‘that modern sensibility...