The Making of Textual Culture: “Grammatica” and Literary Theory, 350–1100 by Martin Irvine (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER value and suggestiveness. In its scope, its method, and much of its bril­ liantly acute textual analysis, this is a powerful contribution to our under­ standing of the politics of intellectual labor and narrative form in fourteenth-century England. ANDREW GALLOWAY Cornell University MARTIN IRVINE. The Making of Textual Culture: "Grammatica" and Liter­ ary Theory, 350-1100. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, vol. 19. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Pp. xix, 604. $59.95. Martin Irvine argues that grammatica, the institution ofmedieval grammar, governs all textuality in the Latin Middle Ages. It produces the techniques and ideologies that shape academic reading, commentary, compilation, and composition. It constructs the terms in which knowledge is understood. Irvine stresses the intertextual assumptions of grammatica and arrogates to it enormous power and productivity: As a discipline sustained by the dominant social and political institutions of medieval Europe, grammatica functioned to perpetuate and reproduce the most fundamental conditions for textual culture, providing the discursive rules and interpretative strategies that constructed certain texts as repositories ofauthority and value. (p. 2) In grammatica, the litteratus, the learned, the cleric, "was consistently gen­ dered as masculine and socially empowered" (p. 2). These are, I think, plausible and powerful arguments. This volume looks at late classical and early medieval treatises as well as poetic commentaries that expound and use the techniques ofgrammatica. A second volume is projected to cover the later Middle Ages. Here, Irvine moves through the textual theories of Clement of Alexandria, Augustine, and Origen to what he claims is the essentially "grammatical" political culture of the Carolingian and Anglo-Saxon periods. He thus includes materials that do not always appear in histories of Latin textual theory. As part of his avowed project to argue for the wide-ranging generative powers ofmedieval grammatical culture, Irvine concludes the book by considering 222 REVIEWS some Anglo-Saxon poems. The book is hugely comprehensive, drawing on a wide bibliography and some materials available only in manuscript. It is a very useful reference work. Nevertheless, the book is not always rigorous in its detail or in its larger arguments. Irvine seems to imply, for instance, that the Aristotelian notion of "ordinary" or "dominant" (kyrios) language is equivalent to the much cruder notion of "proper" (proprius) language, which was to dominate grammatica in the Middle Ages and long after (pp. 104-7). On the other hand, he remarks of the Phaedrus that Plato's "attempt to rewrite textuality and subvert textual memory by philosophical recollection was not success­ ful": the remark echoes the bland tone rather than the content of his claim that the Phaedrus is "replete with irony, humor, and self-parody" (pp. 29, 26). Irvine claims repeatedly that what distinguishes his book from other scholarship on medieval grammatica is his focus on the forms of cultural power located in the discipline. He sees grammatica as the first bastion of clerical hegemony. He foregrounds the first art of the trivium, as against the modern (and medieval) scholars who have emphasized other disciplines. He sees grammatica as a site of medieval hermeneutic control and semantic surveillance. He comments at length on its "technologies of authority­ literacy, normative latinity, knowledge of a literary canon, the scribal arts, book production" (p. 306). Sometimes it all sounds rather homogenous. Although Irvine notes the interpretive innovations of Augustine, Isidore, and the Carolingian De literis colendis, he places enormous stress on their reproduction of ideologies already inscribed into grammatica (pp. 169-71, 185, 210-13, 241-43, 305-13). But he is surely substantially right. However, Irvine's ideological analysis of medieval textual culture and grammatica ends up reproducing some rather traditional versions of both. They are seen as institutionally clerical, religiously orthodox, wedded to textual and disciplinary authority. This seems reductive in each case. The accusation leveled against some other Foucault-derived work seems rele­ vant here: Irvine's analysis of the cultural power of grammatica allows for few sites of resistance or difference. Can it be true that authoritative gram­ matica controls "the entire textual culture of church and monastery" (p. 306; also p. 460)? Even in the book, after all, there is evidence for alternative valuations of grammatica...