Rethinking the New Medievalism ed. by R. Howard Bloch et al. (review)

Rethinking the New Medievalism recalls the controversial special edition of Speculum, The New Philology (1990), edited by Stephen G. Nichols, and The New Medievalism (1991), coedited by Nichols, Marina Brownlee, and Kevin Brownlee, all of whom contributed to this collection of sixteen essays. R. Howard Bloch revisits the polemics and controversy in “The New Philology Comes of Age,” as does Nichols in “New Challenges for the New Medievalism,” and Gabrielle M. Spiegel in “Reflections on The New Philology.” The collection reassesses the state of the New Medievalism, as well as the New Philology, in its interdisciplinary methodology. In regard to textual scholarship, New Medievalism takes traditional philology a step further by asserting a return to the medieval manuscript as the source of meaning as opposed to edited textualizations of the work.

Nichols demonstrates this concept with Roman de la Rose, specifically the Morgan Manuscript (MS Morgan 948, ca. 1525). “New Challenges for the New Medievalism” focuses on digital scholarship, the availability of high resolution scans of original manuscripts. The importance is that now, as never before, scholars can have access to these texts. The Morgan 948 includes unique illustrations and editorial additions addressed to King François I that create an external narrative of the object itself. Looking at any manuscript of Roman de la Rose in this light serves to develop a narrative history of not only the text, but also the evolution of the text as it was transcribed over centuries which gives a greater insight to the prominence of the text in its own time.

Temporality and authorship are themes revisited in the other essays. Daniel Heller-Roazen’s “Dialectic of the Medieval Course,” Joachim Küpper’s “Religious Horizon and Epic Effect,” and Marina Brownlee’s “The Possibility of Historical Time in the Cronica Sarracina” deal with the issue of temporality. Major portions of the essays are also devoted to poststructuralist readings, which seem to be a core tenet of New Medievalism’s methodology. Küpper’s “course” refers to the courses run by corsairs, pirates, and privateers from antiquity to the modern era. New Philology, in this regard, necessitates a philological understanding of the origin of the words: when in time they appear in texts, when pirates become distinct from corsairs or privateers, and how definitions evolved over time. Küpper shows the reader how this process happened and what relevance it has to historical and cultural concepts of the terms and the ambiguity created by fluctuations in terminology. Questions of authorship appear in Jan-Dirk Müller’s “The Identity of the Text,” Jacqueline Cerquiligni-Toulet’s “Conceiving the Text in the Middle Ages,” and Ursula Peters’s “The Pélerinage Corpus in the European Middle Ages: Processes of Retextualization Reflected in the Prologues.” Similar to Nichols’s analysis of the changes made to both the book itself and the text of Roman de la Rose by different scribes, these authors look at what it meant to be an author in the Middle Ages, the glosses the texts were susceptible to, and where we draw the lines of assigning authorship. These are important questions for medieval studies, and the essays are an important contribution in learning how to answer them.

Problems arise in certain essays that use the tools of philology and poststructuralism, but nothing new and nothing related to the extant textual manuscripts. Andreas Kablitz’s “Good Friday Magic” is another use of the New Philology, examining Petrarch’s Canzoniere’s syntax for proof of Petrarch’s breakthroughs in the emancipation of subjectivity. Kablitz combs through the Canzoniere for textual evidence that shows a break with the thinking of its time period and compares it to the writing of Dante. Kevin Brownlee’s “Dante’s Transfigured Ovidian Models” is a close reading of Dante, and Brownlee’s comparisons with Ovid’s Metamorphoses provides a new reading of the text, but the reading is only a standard kind...