Truth and Tales: Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media ed. by Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson (review)

Medievalists consider ourselves experts in disruptive media technologies. One good reason for this self-assessment is our intimacy with a range of media particular to the period that we study: charms on the body, bills on cathedral doors, traveling holster books, household medical compilations, among so many others. Another reason is our struggle with medieval sources, which abound in textual instabilities, vestiges of orality, shifts in language, scribal mouvance. Print itself is a late transformer of manuscript culture, and a phenomenon that mediates how modern students encounter works that originally circulated in manuscript. At a global historical moment when the mobile device has evolved in the course of a few years from Star Trek-style communicator to magic book, medieval media beckon as possible analogues to the digital disruptions that are forcing scholars of later periods to reexamine the homogeneities of print-think. Fiona Somerset’s ambitious introduction to Truth and Tales argues that this collection’s essays show us “the interplay between media, the modes and truth-claims they deploy, and the social status of the speakers and writers of that media” (7). Not all the essays here boldly go where media theory rewrites cultural history, but a consistently high level of discussion offers many pleasurable recognitions.

Any multi-author anthology, print or digital, now offers scant hope that readers will encounter its chapters in dialogue rather than in pdfs of single chapters from interlibrary loan, much like the lamentable JSTOR effect on journal editors’ attempts to create thematic clusters—how many students or scholars now read articles in their published contexts? The editors of this collection do strive successfully to create dialogue despite the double whammy that this book represents a conference (the fourth Canada Chaucer Seminar) and serves as a festschrift for the distinguished literary scholar Richard Firth Green.

Among the most interesting lines of inquiry that develop over this collection is the position of orality in an England that was becoming increasingly dependent on documentary traditions, a topic treated extensively in Green’s important study, A Crisis of Truth: Literature and Law in Ricardian England (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999). Indeed, Crisis of Truth has served as the inspiration for several of the authors included here, a fact acknowledged by the collection’s title. The medieval interpenetrations of orality and literacy in their various forms do provide fascinating analogies to emergent problems of digital literacy. A charming feature of this volume is that Green, the honoree, begins the discussion with an essay that sees continuity between medieval and modern orality in the use of truth-claims. “‘The Vanishing Leper’ and ‘The Murmuring Monk’: Two Medieval Urban Legends” argues that authenticating details in storytelling, specifically the citation of “friend-of-a-friend” sources (or “FOAF” in current messaging parlance) remain to this day as oral strategies, and that no real difference exists between medieval and modern credulity as “true stories” circulate among social networks.

Orality’s power as an authenticating medium echoes through many of the other contributions. Four contributors follow Green’s Crisis of Truth directly in showing how medieval law intertwined oral and literate authorities in ways that exceed the rote formulae for oaths and vows with which many of us are familiar. English common law and cherished traditions of “ancient customs and liberties” were grounded in an oral memory that was suspicious of—yet dependent upon—written witness. Stephen Yeager, in “The New Plow and the Old: Law, Orality, and the Figure of Piers the Plowman in B 19,” argues that Piers and his plouʓ of land symbolize a preliterate tradition of land tenure based on the Domesday Book and on oral transmissions of early English law. Barbara Hanawalt’s “Toward the Common Good: Punishing Fraud among the Victualers of Medieval London” cites Green directly to show that the “interplay between oral and written, popular and high culture, official law...