Imagining the Pagan in Late Medieval England by Sarah Salih (review)

Sarah Salih's Imagining the Pagan in Late Medieval England draws together a range of materials to examine problems of representation, materiality, and biblical iconoclasm in fifteenth-century England. Methodologically, Salih builds on Bruno Latour's work in actor-network theory, especially his On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, as well as Caroline Walker Bynum's and Michael Camille's research into the functions of medieval material objects, to explore tensions between Christianity and what she calls "paganity." As Salih's argument unfolds, cities and idols become particularly fraught and mutually interdependent sites for these tensions. Specifically, cities are what medieval English Christians inherit from the past, and idols are what they overthrow in the past. In plumbing the paradoxes embedded in these Christian material inheritances, Imagining the Pagan in Late Medieval England illuminates a variety of Middle English texts while also providing a useful theoretical framework for those working on myths of urban foundation, medieval classicism, hagiography, travel literature, iconophilia, and iconoclasm within and beyond fifteenth-century England.

The introduction is the only one of the major sections that does not specifically organize itself around analyses of cities and idols. Instead, it establishes the framework for "paganity" as a site of inquiry. She uses this term to distinguish the largely imaginary cultural interlocutor that late medieval Christianity sustains for itself in its received historiography and sacred tradition (3 n. 12) from the historical practices that Christians might have described as "pagan." This imagined historical "paganity" is Salih's key interest here, not least because, as she observes, "There were no actual pagans in late medieval England" (2). Salih adapts Sylvia Tomasch's concept of the "virtual Jew" to theorize a "virtual pagan," a figure that allows her to discuss how literally absent pagans function in the imaginations of fifteenth-century English Christians. These virtual pagans acquire their cultural prominence from their presence at national, ethnic, or urban points of origin. Pagan Trojans founded both Rome and Britain, to give two examples to which Salih often returns. Appropriately, these legendary founders persist in the medieval imagination with a set of characteristic traits or topoi: "The pagans of classical legend are socially magnificent, technologically adept, founders of nations, cities and social order, but later degenerate into the sadistic but inept rulers and patriarchs of hagiographic encounters" (24). The positive traits keep the pagans continually before late medieval English Christians as exemplars, while the historiographic arc of their achievement and decline structures Christian society's account of its own superseding of these societies. This arc, from the founding of cities to their conversion to Christianity and then to their persistence under Christian control, provides the basic structure of Salih's argument.

The first chapter after this introduction, entitled "Origins: Building Cities, Making Idols," examines pagans as builders and thus as founders of built urban landscapes. Analyses of Lydgate's Troy Book bookend this chapter, and scholars interested in Lydgate's classical romances in particular will likely find this chapter of most interest. In Salih's analysis, Lydgate participates in a tradition of appropriating Troy for, and distinguishing Troy from, Britain and its cities. Central to this distinction is the function of the idol, and this chapter takes a wide chronological and temporal sweep to situate the idol theoretically, historically, and corporeally. It presents patristic and medieval Christian accounts of the idol as dead matter potentially animated by the worship of its devotees and—sometimes—the spirit of demons. Salih reads this Christian idol theory alongside the modern thinkers—Latour, Bynum, and Camille again, but also prominently Sara Ahmed and Bill Brown—finding rich dialogue in their discussions of objects, materiality, and idols. Grounding its discussion in the Hebrew Bible's Book of Wisdom, the chapter locates the beginnings of idolatry in a father's veneration of a vicarious object that stands in for his deceased son. This conflation of absent body and ambiguous idol sets the idol up as a...