Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London by Arthur Bahr (review)

As the material turn has driven more scholars of medieval literature to examine texts within their manuscript contexts and to probe ways of reading manuscripts as texts in their own right, the problem of terminology has loomed over critical discussion. Modern terms like “miscellany” and “anthology” excite controversy because scholars load them with a shifting range of meanings and implications for the contingencies, intentions, and practical and literary judgments driving medieval manuscript production. The modern appellation of ‘compilation’ offers a potential grounding of sense in the medieval concept of compilatio, but modern and medieval discourses of compilation are often, and perhaps inevitably, out of step. Scholarly contestations of these terms point to more fundamental questions: to what extent do we invest manuscripts with coherence on account of our own desire for knowable order and purpose? when do we abdicate potentially fruitful lines of scholarly inquiry in cautiously dismissing the possibility of discoverable coherence in apparently heterogeneous manuscripts? on what foundations can such inquiry be grounded?

Arthur Bahr engages many of these issues in the theoretical meditations and nimble readings that constitute Fragments and Assemblages: Forming Compilations of Medieval London. Navigating the vexed questions of what we actually mean when we talk about compilation and the extent to which the term encompasses or elides codicological and literary constructions, Bahr suggests that the concept be understood in a subjective sense, not as a product of bookmakers or authors or even self-styled compilers, but as a mode of reading, of “perceiving such forms [i.e., “texts or objects”] so as to disclose an interpretably meaningful arrangement, thereby bringing into being a text/work that is more than the sum of its parts” (3). In espousing this understanding of compilation, Bahr begins to relocate the grounds on which its identity is determined to the reader, though he is careful to indicate the necessity of establishing “what constitutes a legitimate invitation to compilational reading” (11). He nonetheless focuses on works conventionally understood as compilations: the corpus of manuscripts compiled by City chamberlain Andrew Horn, the third booklet of the Auchinleck manuscript, several linked textual clusters within The Canterbury Tales, and the trilingual collection of Gower’s poetry housed within the Trentham manuscript.

Bahr’s reorientation of compilation as a subjective interpretive mode prefigures his project in the rest of Fragments and Assemblages. His compilational readings take their shape from the book’s driving interest in the London communities whose unities, divisions, and efforts at self-definition, royal critique, and aristocratic imitation he traces in the textual and verbal juxtapositions of four London compilations. The volume itself embodies a pleasingly structured compilation in its arrangement of adroit readings of literary, codicological, and civic assemblage and fragmentation as forces shaping and, at times, aligning the formal properties and textual preoccupations of these four works.

Bahr’s first chapter, “Civic Counterfactualism and the Assemblage of London: The Corpus of Andrew Horn,” argues that in the legally and civically minded manuscripts whose compilation he oversaw early in the fourteenth century, Horn enacts and perpetuates a kind of textual management crucial to the preservation of London’s civic and economic liberties. In one of several juxtapositional readings within the chapter, Bahr identifies a “poetics of assemblage” in the codicological and interpretive tensions that frame and permeate the idiosyncratic Mirror of Justices and in the text’s own function as a frame that redirects readings of the legal treatise Britton, with which Mirror is paired physically and verbally by Horn. In the dialogue he explores between a cluster of texts within Horn’s Liber regum, Bahr uncovers an imitative anxiety—in this case, a civic anxiety over the translation of continental models of civic self-governance to London, constrained as it was in the early fourteenth century by a powerful monarchy—that informs the concerns of his next chapter as well.

“Fragmentary Forms of Imitative Fantasy: Booklet 3 of the Auchinleck Manuscript” examines physical and textual manifestations of imitative desire...