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

How did medieval people perceive the labor of history? How did they perceive, that is, not the past itself, but the processes of understanding the past and of gathering together information about it? In this imaginative and engaging book, Sarah Elliott Novacich explores these questions via three episodes in sacred history: the stories of Eden, Noah, and the Harrowing of Hell. Each episode involves the creation, selection, or recollection of what might be called, in the modern theoretical sense of the term, ‘an archive.’ Mystery plays portraying these stories are central to the book, but the study also travels through an eclectic range of other primary texts.

The first chapter proposes that there is a contradiction baked into the idea of the Garden of Eden, a location in space and time which serves both as a lost original which the postlapsarian world copies, badly, and as something recorded, re-recorded, and so to some extent summoned up through the creative exercise of imagination in that same postlapsarian world. Novacich identifies a blurring of the two understandings in the mystery plays’ struggle to stage the Garden. In the second chapter, Novacich considers treatments in romances and chronicles of Noah’s Ark and other seafarers (including Brutus) whose medieval stories resonate with that of Noah. These stories, she suggests, orbit uneasily around the processes of selection and exclusion involved in stocking a boat, but also, analogously, involved in compiling a record or history. The third chapter extends this thread into an examination of the character of Noah’s wife in the mystery plays. In Noah’s wife, a previously minor figure who plays an expanded role in later medieval English dramatic versions of the Ark narrative, Novacich finds a speaker who points out the losses and problems implied by Noah’s selection activity, in ways analogous to some moves in the history of modern feminist literary criticism. The fourth chapter turns to the Harrowing of Hell and other medieval narratives which might recall it, such as Sir Orfeo and the St Patrick’s Purgatory tradition. Novacich proposes that these texts (and images: the figures contain several startling hell mouths from medieval manuscripts), presenting the return of the past through people observed in or rescued from an underworld, show us both the power and the risk inherent in the act of looking back at the past and inviting it into the present. The final chapter explores the accounts of the Harrowing in the mystery plays, where Novacich identifies tensions between the Harrowing’s finality, as a moment when Jewish prophets and patriarchs are shuffled into place in a new Christian history, and the necessarily repetitious, rehearsed, and enduring nature of the plays themselves. Overall, the book depicts a culture which was keenly conscious both of the past and of the processes by which it might be ordered and preserved.

The considerable range of both this book’s primary texts and its theoretical armory could invite objections: as an extreme example, about three centuries separate the thought of Hugh of St Victor (discussed pp. 59–66) and the manuscripts of the York and N-Town plays—in other words, roughly the same time as separates us from Daniel Defoe—so finding both being taken as grist in the same monograph, without intervening diachronic passages, might surprise. This range is really, however, the mark of an alternative approach which thrives on mirroring, resonance, and what Novacich calls ‘imagined adjacency’ (p. 163). The book does not attempt a conclusive or comprehensive study of archival thought in later medieval England, but rather presents an invigorating series of readings with much to offer other researchers. The book will be of interest to specialists in early English drama, but, precisely because of its much wider range, it will also have value for a broader readership: Novacich’s work on sacred...