Medieval Narratives of Alexander the Great: Transnational Texts in England and France by Venetia Bridges (review)

To frame her book's subject—texts about Alexander the Great composed between the mid-twelfth and mid-fourteenth centuries in northern France and the British Isles—Venetia Bridges turns in her introduction and conclusion to Chaucer's Monk's Tale. There, while cataloguing those poor souls on the bottom of Fortune's wheel, the Monk not only characterizes Alexander's nature ("gentil," "worthy"), but the nature of Alexander's "storie": "so commune … That every wight that hath discrecioun / Hath herd somwhat or al of his fortune" (MkT, VII.2658, 2631–33). Bridges reads these lines straight in her introduction, as evidence that Alexander's story, "so commune," was both widely known and ordinary—the latter condition being largely a function of the former. In her book's conclusion, she posits an alternative and cannier reading of these lines, for her work in the intervening pages makes clear that while Alexander may have been a ubiquitous figure in northern France and Britain, no single, "commune" story about him circulated in the medieval period: a fact Chaucer must have known, even if his Monk did not. Occupying a space between epic and memory, the medieval renderings of Alexander, Bridges asserts, interacted with or interrupted various presents: geographical, political, linguistic, material. "What is the range of meanings," she queries in her introduction, "in which Alexander participates in literary contexts during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries? How do these meanings relate to cultural identities as they form and re-form in this period of swift change and innovation?" (2). Her book's five chapters attend to these questions by contextualizing and interrogating Latin, French, Anglo-Norman, and Middle English narratives of Alexander within their various milieux and through a series of very fine readings.

But the Monk's language quietly raises another issue Bridges concerns herself with throughout this book, namely the handling of Alexander narratives not only in the medieval period, but in modern scholarship. Bridges calls into question a series of binaries that, she argues, have so incrementally come to structure the study of romances generally, and romances about Alexander specifically, that they often go unquestioned and untested: history and fiction; Latin and the vernacular; local and global; "us" and the "other." She pushes back against the scholarly reading of vernacular romances as expressions of identity and proto-nationalism. We are in thrall to this mode of analysis, she suggests, at least partly because of how easily it maps onto disciplinary boundaries.

Bridges advocates for a "transnational" lens because, she writes, of the scope it offers. Boundaries are visible, but so too is the terrain on either side of them, the "local" and its opposite. One gets the strong sense that Bridges's keenest interest lies not in the book's textual field of Alexander, but in the theoretical possibilities of a transnational approach to that field and the possibilities it offers for the productive (dis)organization of scholarship more broadly. The repeated suggestion of those possibilities proves to be the book's most promising and most challenging aspect. On the one hand, Bridges urges us to imagine a new textual approach that prioritizes texts' movements across a range of boundaries and among multilingual networks. Her book is rich with important analysis: new readings of both key and previously overlooked passages demonstrate the ways in which authors grappled with their historical inheritance, or lack thereof, and Bridges's acute contextualizing of that inheritance evinces the recognition that medieval authors' predilection for crossing boundaries—whether linguistic, political, temporal, or generic—is often at odds with how we circumscribe their texts in our own work. Yet, on the other hand, the book itself stops short of proposing in detail or fully embodying a "transnational" mode of scholarship. Each chapter takes up the findings of the previous chapter(s) for the sake of comparative analysis...