The Medieval Literary: Beyond Form ed. by Robert J. Meyer-Lee, Catherine Sanok (review)

After three decades of historicist hegemony, a return to the formal study of literature seems almost inevitable. The “New Formalism” in literary study, however, has not coalesced around a single idiom or ideology, or out of a particular university department or set of scholars. Instead, it has been more evocative than explanatory—a set of exhortations rather than fixed methodology. In medieval and early modern studies, such “formalist” incentives have been various. Some scholars, for example, argue for the physical format of manuscript and early book production: for the ways in which the visual organization of words, lines, and sections on the page conveyed a meaning to a historical audience about genre or content. Other scholars have sought to define the medieval literary as a question of linguistic form, as if returning to the Russian Formalist fascinations with “literariness.” And some have subsumed under the category of form a focus on the aesthetic, emotive, or affective experience of literature, as if to affirm that it is once again permissible to enjoy reading, research, and teaching. Are some works better than others? Are some authors more important than others? Such questions, challenged by high theory and historicism and by the practices of current pedagogy rear up (sometimes explicitly, often implicitly) whenever form or formalism is invoked.

The collection under review presents communications, as it were, from the front lines of formal study in medieval literature. Each of its contributors offers ways of understanding the formal qualities of the particular aspects of literary culture that they study. The pleasures of this book, therefore, are those of confirmation rather than surprise. Claire Waters writes on Marian miracles, Ingrid Nelson on Middle English Lyric, and Jessica Brantley on Books of Hours—pairings of scholar and subject that will be familiar to anyone who has followed their careers. So, too, Kathryn Kerby-Fulton displays the full range of her codicological sensitivity in a study of manuscript mise en page. Shannon Gayk gives us her range of approach to medieval drama. Seeta Cheganti proffers a characteristically adventurous association of medieval and modern, here Chaucer and Robert Smithson. Maura Nolan locates Chaucerian physiognomy in the forms of illustration. And the other contributors offer work that dovetails with the lines of study for which they are best known.

This is a potentially important collection for anyone at any level interested in the new directions of medieval scholarship. For all the efforts of the editors—an excellent introductory review of the emergence of new formalism in literary study, and a pointed set of summaries of each of the contributions—the collection does not have the party-line univocality of similar collections of historicist work from, say, the 1980s. I do think that what yokes these essays together is really more of a generational sensibility than any methodological orthodoxy. Almost all of the contributors are women; almost all of them are of an academic generation younger than I am. I think these features are significant, as they present a set of idioms of study, a way in which attention to forms of all kinds create a much more porous critical practice than the New Historicism did. And while none of the essays explicitly addresses this point, I do think it worth noting that one of the major critiques of the New Historicism was its aggressive masculinism—both in its practitioners and in its canons. Is formalism gendered? Such a question may be left for future volumes and researches.

For a reader of my age and sensibility, there is much to learn from these essays. For me, the most rewarding included Brantley’s and Kerby-Fulton/Klein’s deeply attentive (and excellently illustrated) studies of layout and scribal presentation. Nolan’s essay is a model of scholarship on images (I would give it to any graduate student looking to learn how to research and write). There are, however, things I missed...