Shaping the Archive in Late Medieval England: History, Poetry, and Performance by Sarah Elliott Novacich (review)

For medievalists, the archive can be a site of fascination and frustration in equal measure, the closest we can come to a point of unmediated contact with the past as an object of study. As Sarah Elliott Novacich's important new book shows, however, the "archival desire" both to access and control the past is as much a medieval preoccupation as a modern one, and is not limited to the handling of books and artifacts. Other scholars have done much to explore the formation and dissolution of specific collections, as well as the broader ramifications of medieval documentary and book cultures, but Novacich's concern is with the idea of the archive and the many forms of desire it represents rather than with material archives themselves. Her study focuses primarily on the diverse medieval responses to three stories of world-defining collections from the Christian tradition: the Garden of Eden, which encloses a model of perfection and excludes everything else; Noah's ark, which carries a small portion of the present into the future while consigning the rest to oblivion; and the extrabiblical narrative of the Harrowing of Hell, in which the recently crucified Christ descends into the vast storehouse of hell, curating a smaller collection of souls to be saved. For medieval thinkers, Novacich argues, these episodes "represent the desire to amass collections that fully account for the world" (2); her epilogue uses the example of the "golden records" aboard the Voyager spacecraft to show how this desire still resonates for us.

Although the book is fairly short, it incorporates (in true archival fashion) a broad range of medieval and modern texts, performances, genres, and critical theories. While Novacich offers nuanced and insightful readings of many texts and contexts, her discussions of any single work rarely last more than a few pages: her goal is less to offer in-depth and comprehensive reevaluations of specific texts and authors than to trace the threads of common themes and concerns that link different texts and periods together. This approach is undoubtedly fruitful, and the lines of her argument are richly evocative, but readers may sometimes wonder what salient differences are being elided in these broadly defined collections. The book discusses each of its three core narratives in two parts: one focused on drama, generally mystery plays from the English vernacular cycles; and one focused on other genres, which variously include lyric and narrative poetry, chronicles, romances, and theological or devotional texts. Novacich uses these complementary discussions to reveal shared preoccupations across genres, but her discussions of medieval performance traditions are especially satisfying in their blend of textual analysis, details of historical staging practice, and modern performance theory.

The book's introduction lays both historical and theoretical groundwork for Novavich's project: it briefly acknowledges medieval authors who saw themselves contributing to or reflecting upon other kinds of archival projects, such as bureaucratic record-keeping, and it introduces the modern and medieval underpinnings of the archive theory upon which the book is based, beginning with Isidore of Seville's unpacking of the etymological resonances among archive, ark, and arcana. She considers the risks of treating "the archive" solely in conceptual terms, as Derrida and Foucault do, as well as the risk of fetishizing the material object in book history: the tension between "dustless" and "dusty" archives. Throughout the rest of the book, the theoretical approach predominates, but she also considers one pragmatic archival project with direct relevance to her work, the Records of Early English Drama, which clearly informs her careful and vivid discussions of space and movement in the mystery plays.

Novacich begins, appropriately, with the Garden of Eden, the original "garden of exemplars" (25), which is the subject of the book's first chapter, "Model Worlds." In her reading, however, the relationship between the enclosed garden and the postlapsarian world is a study in the ambiguous differentiation between originals and records...