The Shock of Medievalism by Kathleen Biddick (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER in the Bible. He suggests that "as a Christian author active in England at the end of the fourteenth century Chaucer might well have thought of his works in precisely this audacious way" (p. 207). How Chaucer thought of his work is a subject on which there are many views. Besserman, however, feels confident that Chaucer was searching for "a biblically inspired and biblically modeled vernacular literary solution to the fragmented and fractious flood of biblical transla­ tion and interpretation in which his Christian community was adrift" (p. 207). The author is responding, so Besserman maintains, to "a prob­ lem that had bedeviled Christian culture from the time of Augustine: the problem of the mutual translatability of secular and biblical poetics" (p. 209). Besserman argues persuasively that in common with the poetry of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio Chaucer's poetry was shaped by what he perceived to be "the affinities between biblical and secular poetry and biblical and secular poetics" (p. 17). The vernacular biblical paraphrases and translations that were a prominent feature of Chaucer's cultural mi­ lieu and the artistry of the biblically centered works by his Ricardian contemporaries were inspired by the religious milieu of fourteenth­ century theologians and secular drama and reflect "the unprecedented authorial freedom and affective intensity" that may be seen in some of the "biblically suffused" writing of the time (p. 23). As will be realized, this work is for the specialist. Apart from Chau­ cer's works, the beginning student should, I suggest, read good critical biographies by scholars such as those I have already named. What mis­ conceptions might arise if this book were made a primary text for begin­ ners in Chaucer, I cannot imagine. BERYL ROWLAND York University and University of Victoria KATHLEEN BIDDICK. The Shock of Medievalism. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1998. Pp. 304. $49.95 cloth, $17.95 paper. The Shock ofMedievalism means to explore how "trauma (then and now) affect[s} the ways in which medievalists connect the past to the present 456 REVIEWS and to the future" (p. 16). It also means to shock, and some of its readers will likely feel perplexed about the relation between the book's stated wish to work through trauma and its investment in provocation.But the book's power to perplex results, at least in part, from the way it replays trauma in the structure and procedures of its arguments: a bold point is made, but its working-through is delayed. Presentation of evi­ dence and reasoning often arrives too late to reassure the reader that Biddick's aim is demonstration rather than denunciation. She claims, for example, that in The Dream ofJohn Ball William Morris "misrecog­ nized the work of mourning as melancholy for work. That misrecogni­ tion persists even today among such strong new historicist readings of the uprising as Steven Justice's" (p. 39). Careful discussion of this criti­ cism ofJustice doesn't arrive, however, for four pages. Neither the essay­ istic ambience of the chapters nor the very wide range of topics they address-from "Gothic Ornament" in the nineteenth-century (chapter 1) to humanist/colonialist knowledge-production in virtual reality (chapter 3)-do much to dispel the impression thatBiddick's authorita­ tiveness may be more a matter of temper than pains taken. Rather than being good reasons not to read this book, however, these are reasons to read it twice. Because Biddick's book seems to be a particularly challenging in­ stance of the medievalist syndrome it also analyzes, and because her re­ fusal to settle keeps questions open that might otherwise prefer to close over, this book should be read by positivists, New Historicists, and the­ orists alike. Positivists may not be interested inBiddick's theoretical arguments, but if they are interested in historicizing their own tech­ nique-which would seem logical-they will find much in this book to think about. The book also includes fascinating specifics and the fas­ cination with specifics that has been so inspirational for New Histori­ cism. At many moments one feels, happily, the touch ofBiddick's train­ ing as an historian: Why was Past andPresent so thick...