Violence and the Writing of History in the Medieval Francophone World ed. by Noah D. Guynn and Zrinka Stahuljak (review)

This rich and varied collection of essays delves into the language of historical representation and the position of the vernacular in communicating historical knowledge. It focuses on authors writing in French or living within the medieval francophone world and will be of interest to anyone curious about the relationship between historiography and violence in the medieval and modern West. This study of the commemoration and transformation of violent events weaves together many themes and theoretical approaches by building on scholarly work on medieval historical representation in literature, history, and linguistics. The Introduction challenges how the modern scholar can recover the textual traces of medieval lived experience from within the strictures of a discipline ‘that claims to access the truth of the past by discrediting the means by which the past was remembered in the past’ (p. 3). This challenge involves the re-evaluation of genre: one that requires a shift from viewing a textual fragment as a less than reliable repository of historical data to perceiving it instead as a type of historical consciousness. It offers an interesting alternative perspective on this question, which is that a greater understanding of the sophisticated and often self-conscious relationship between historicity and violence in medieval historical narratives will raise awareness both of the historical and cultural significance of this relationship and of its distance from our own intellectually and ideologically driven conceptions of the past. The volume is organized in four parts and discusses examples from epic, chronicles, history, romance, poetry, and biography. Part I features chapters by Andrew Cowell and Noah D. Guynn and aims to theorize violence according to violent actions and social relations, and in terms of rhetorical language and narrative representation. In Part II Jeff Rider, Leah Shopkow, Matthew Fisher, and Karen Sullivan consider forms of aggression engaged in the pursuit of political or religious objectives and the subversion of social and political power. In Part III David Rollo and Zrinka Stahuljak each examine gender and sexuality as modes of analysis that are crucial to the narrative constructs and reconstructions of the historical past. Part IV heralds a new development in the reading of medieval violence as Deborah McGrady, Rosalind Brown-Grant, and Simon Gaunt consider war as a traumatic event that is open to transformation in myriad ways for a variety of motives. This collection will be a useful resource both for undergraduate teaching and for further research in medieval literature, linguistics, history, and cultural studies.