Talk and Textual Production in Medieval England by Marisa Libbon

In this strikingly original and thought-provoking book, Marisa Libbon asks us to think about how we have come to trust that what we know of the past is true. Historical narrative and scholarly consensus alike are the result of a number of factors, one of which is especially complex, fundamentally important, and until now, undertheorized: talk. Rumors circulate; scholars cite theories as commonplaces; witnesses rehearse stories in the courtroom. Talk is a critical mode of producing, asserting, and repeating ideas as truth, and this book assesses what kinds of talk are rendered important, where, and by whom.

Talk and Textual Production in Medieval England conceptualizes talk as something more solid and respected than mere gossip but slightly askew from verified fact or forensic evidence. Talk is not the same as written records, but it is foundational for their construction, and thus it can be assessed within those records. As Libbon says, talk “was not then and is not now wholly ephemeral” (6). We can find evidence of talk by paying close attention to the circumstances in which texts are produced and circulated, thinking specifically about what rumors and local issues might have found their ways in. Indeed, when we take talk seriously as a methodological approach to historical and archival study, we find that we cannot think of oral and written forms of information, evidence, and storytelling as opposed or even all that different. In pursuing talk as a vital part of history-making, Talk and Textual Production crucially advances the conversations in several scholarly subfields, including manuscript and book history, medieval historiography, and orality and literacy studies.

“Talk” is a capacious and difficult-to-define hermeneutic, so Libbon smartly takes a narrow focus on Richard I’s complex historical and cultural legacy. Yet this book easily exceeds its specific object of analysis. Although those working on Richard and the romance tradition will certainly find in this book new and exciting ways of encountering the stories they think they know well, medievalists in other areas will also find a model for how to think in nuanced ways about textual production and reception.

Chapter 1 is an especially elegant depiction of how scholarly talk produces a putatively “complete” text and core of accepted stories. The chapter deftly weaves together the story of the production of Brunner’s edition of Richard Löwenherz in fin-de-siècle Vienna with twelfth-and thirteenth-century accounts of Richard’s time in Vienna, such as the Historia de expeditione Frederici Imperatoris and Magnus of Reichersberg’s Chronicon. Both Richard Löwenherz and the medieval chronicles depict how talk of local, contemporary issues permeates the narrative of past events, yet that talk is obscured in the assumption that the texts offer the complete version of history. By unravel-ing the specific conditions under which this talk occurs, Libbon traces the ideological and historical motivations behind texts we have come to accept as “original,” “complete,” or “authoritative.”

In chapter 2, talk emerges as a central part of the evolution of legal evidentiary standards in the thirteenth century. The chapter begins with Edward’s 1290 quo warranto statute, which established the king’s right to demand that landholders provide proof of their property rights and inheritances. It did so with a temporal limit, “the time of King Richard,” and in doing so, it helped establish the terminus of local memory and the origin of English sovereign power. Moreover, as quo warranto hearings in the eyre courts gathered crowds from the shires, the stories told by landowners were solidified as legal evidence of inheritance rights. The chapter thus broadly focuses on ways unofficial talk can be transformed into official local history, and then how that local history ossifies into legislation and historical fact.

The next three chapters concentrate on material texts. Chapter 3 focuses on Oxford, Christ Church 92, which was begun in 1326 when Edward II was in power and finished in 1327 after his regicide. The manuscript’s volatile political context means that it had to respond quickly to frame the young Edward III as a new start for England; it did so by constructing Edward III as part of a legacy rooted in Richard’s celebrated reign rather than in Edward II’s dismal one. The manuscript includes fourteen full-page line drawings that feature depictions of siege warfare, which Libbon persuasively demonstrates are rooted in the stories circulating about Richard in the eyre courts in the early fourteenth century. In doing so, she wrests these drawings from the centrifugal force created by Richard Coeur de Lion, which was produced after this manuscript but nonetheless is often used as a retrospective lens for it because it is considered a more “complete” version of this “fragmented” text. Although reading these drawings on their own is rewarding and persuasive, Libbon might have explored them alongside other visual programs that seek to harness how talk works in producing coherent stories. Indeed, more engagement with the terrific work on the visuals of auditory experience by such scholars as Emma Dillon or Matthew G. Shoaf might have provided avenues for conceptualizing these drawings within a long-standing practice of visually instructing audiences and readers on how to listen to important talk.

Nonetheless, chapter 3 is a welcome intervention into scholarly tendencies toward textual “wholeness,” and by the time Libbon examines the Auchinleck manuscript’s King Richard (Edinburgh, National Library of Scotland, MS Advocates 19.2.1) in her fourth chapter, she has successfully recalibrated the drive toward textual unity. As Libbon shows in the previous chapters, various kinds of talk, official and unofficial, have constructed pictures of a valiant, conquering Richard, and so we must investigate how Auchinleck preserves “the ways in which Auchinleck’s makers grappled with and responded to talk as a context essential to medieval textual production” (144). For Libbon, the Auchinleck’s “fragmentary” King Richard is not “completed” by Richard Coeur de Lion. Rather, Auchinleck’s short King Richard reveals that text-makers themselves were aware of how talk creates truth; for example, the initial lines focused on King Richard’s “stori” enables the Auchinleck manuscript to conceptualize Richard as central to a new narrative of England’s collective descent.

In the final chapter, Libbon develops a theory of the “modular manuscript” within the textual corpus of Richard Coeur de Lion. For Libbon, the stories of Richard’s time in Messina, Cyprus, and the siege of Acre, around which his status as English hero coagulated, form a kind of “core rumor” that shifted from copy to copy. Other rumors were added and taken away according to the local talk that produced a particular version of the text. In this new material history, Richard Coeur de Lion’s multiplicity is not a problem to be solved. Rather, it depicts the story’s flexibility to absorb and reflect local conversations. Libbon thus does not work on a deficit model in which manuscript culture’s fragmentary nature can be smoothed into complete or full text; instead, she carefully maps the separable (or modular) bits of local talk that together demonstrate the complex construction of Richard’s outsized status in medieval England and beyond.

The coda gestures to a subfield not explored in the book: sound studies. Libbon rightly asserts that including talk in any archival project would help contextualize the medieval fascination with sound, but this book does not do so. Indeed, keeping sound on the margins of the book belies some of the book’s claims of recalibrating our outsized reliance on the written word to the detriment of a fuller sense of how manuscripts, history, and scholarly consensus are produced. It does, however, provide an opening for other scholars to build on Libbon’s exciting scholarship. “Talk” should be an essential feature of manuscript and archival studies, book history, and historiography. Libbon shows us how important it is and how well it can work.