South Atlantic Modern Language Association

The Making of Middle English, 1765-1919 by David MatthewsReview by: Richard UtzSouth Atlantic Review, Vol. 66, No. 4 (Autumn, 2001), pp. 210-213Published by: South Atlantic Modern Language AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3202089 .

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210 Book Reviews

some questioning of how it engages with the cultural politics of Britain in the 1980s, when Thatcherite conservatism was unhesitantly revitaliz-

ing the discredited tropes of masculinity, Imperialism, and Englishness, thus making the travails of Scottish masculinity, as explored by Banks, Gray and Welsh, particularly anxious. This continued deployment of an unreconstructed masculinity in mainstream politics (the paradoxes of Thatcher's embodiment of phallicism are explored in Jacqueline Rose's

provocative essay, "Margaret Thatcher and Ruth Ellis")' throws ques- tions over the efficacy of theoretical and aesthetic New Manism.

The strengths of Schoene-Harwood's study lie in its theoretical

probings of fiction's engagements with "patriarchal masculinity." The

imaginative readings contained here persuade us of the necessity and

difficulty of utopian reimaginings of gender. Schoene-Harwood shows that heterosexual masculinity, if not recreating itself, is at least involved in imaginative explorations of the pitfalls of its own construction, and the challenge of making itself anew, less rigidly defined against spectres of otherness. At least in postmodern theory and fiction, heterosexual

masculinity is "outdated and outmoded" (173). Schoene-Harwood's

theorizing of an icriture masculine introduces insightful ways of seeing how masculinity might be imaginatively recreated; his argument unfolds these possibilities with cautious optimism, but wisely refrains from wish- ful celebration.

Hugh Stevens, University of York

NOTE

In Jacqueline Rose, Why War? Psychoanalysis, Politics and the Return to Melanie Klein (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), pp. 41-86.

The Making of Middle English, 1765-1919. By David Matthews. Medieval Cultures, 18. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. xxxv + 231 pp. $39.95.

In 1871, in the Trial-Forewords to my 'Parallel-Text Edition of Chaucer's MinorPoems, "FrederickJames Furnivall praised Bernhard ten Brink and his Chaucer: Studien zur Geschichte seiner Entwicklung und zur Chronologie seiner Schriften (also 1871) for having "let a flood of light in on the mat- ter" (6). Then, Furnivall was greatly pleased that ten Brink had pro- duced ample evidence of three distinct periods in Chaucer's work. To- day, I am at least as enthusiastic about David Matthews's study, a book

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South Atlantic Review 211

which is truly enlightening not only about one author or specific prob- lem, but about medieval studies as a whole. Matthews's book demon- strates everything one could wish for in outstanding scholarship: it is theoretically sophisticated, applying the work of Michel Foucault and Pierre Bourdieu to the genesis and development of Middle English with much ease and with excellent results; it is thoroughly researched and so expertly revised and edited that I did not find a single spelling problem or other erratum on more than 200 pages during two consecu- tive readings; it is written in a crystal clear language and suggests the connectedness of its chapters not simply through logic or the chronol- ogy of events but through an artful placing of anecdotes and events which is more an intellectual necessity than organizational device; and most importantly, its results are a challenge to the ways we medievalists have preferred to think about ourselves and our discipline.

What is unique about Matthews's perspective is his conscious and sustained effort never to assume, despite his position as historian of the discipline, that he is sitting in haughty judgment upon the works and lives of scholars and readers of Middle English from the eigh- teenth and nineteenth centuries. Unlike so many continuist or progres- sivist readings of bygone scholarship (for example, Norman Cantor), he avoids denigrating it; and unlike the proponents of the so-called "New-Philology" of the 1990s (for example, Stephen G. Nichols, R. Howard Bloch), who have advocated a rather limiting reconcentration of medieval scholarship on medieval manuscript study, he validates the history of printed editions (which are no less marked by their social circulation than manuscripts) and makes them the main source for his material philology (Jacob Grimm's Sachphilologie?). The practice of edit- ing and the microhistories of the various paratextual features of printed editions are to Matthews cosubstantial to interpretation and, especially in the mostly extramural Middle English prior to the 1870s, crucial to an account of what constituted the early consideration of English. His narrative of the genesis and development of Middle English study be- gins in the 1760s, a phase which often involved "a connection between the literature promoted by the scholar and the scholar's advancement through aesthetic work on the self, a form of work usually developed in the furtherance of aristocratic patronage" (xxiii), and moves toward the 1870s, when Middle English was connected to nationalistic and patri- otic agendas and entered the realm of the universities. The scholars Matthews selects for detailed discussion are Thomas Percy, Thomas Warton, Joseph Ritson, Walter Scott, Henry Weber, Frederic Madden, E J. Furnivall, Walter W Skeat, and Henry Bradshaw

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212 Book Reviews

Among the surprising-and convincing-revisions of traditional, continuist work on the history of medieval English scholarship is, to mention at least one example, the career of Joseph Ritson, whose radi- cal political predilections and personal eccentricities, together with his demands for authenticity of source and the authentic representation of such a source have so far been seen as breaking the boundaries of pos- sible knowledges (Foucault's "episteme") in the final quarter of the eigh- teenth century. As Matthews demonstrates, Ritson did not usher in ob- jectivist editorial practices 60 years before the heighdays of compara- tive philology. Rather, his method of Textkritik was "completely in ac- cord with that of his contemporaries" (42). Furthermore, for Ritson as for his predecessors and immediate contemporaries, "medieval poetry represented pictures of life and manners and was useful for historicist purposes. Consequently, the more objectively the poetry itself was rep- resented, the more accurately it could be read as a historicist docu- ment" (42).

Perhaps the most valuable result for the current and future discus- sions of an increasingly self-reflective medieval studies is contained within the general conclusion Matthews draws from his fascinating for- ays into the archaeology of the discipline, namely that "[w]e have to accept that a great deal of the Middle English literature has never, in the modern period, been of broad interest" (192). Far from blaming the Burckhardtian or New Historicist master narrative of Western cul- tural history for the allegedly increasing marginality of medieval stud- ies, he provides irrefutable evidence that, historically, "Middle English had a constantly marginal status within English studies by comparison with other areas in the discipline" (196). Instead of calling for more presentist relevance and simplistic theory-mindedness in medieval studies or repeating the commonly entuned, gloomy dirge of "ubi sunt" about the prelapsarian days when every country vicar would read all of Middle English, he proposes that: 1) "we need to invest more fully in the alien and difficult parts of our subject" (194), and 2) "There is ... a need to invest in the history of the transmission of Middle English texts via print technology" (195).

With his first request, Matthews draws attention to the astonishing fact that, even in this age of electronic publication, when more people are reading Chaucer, Langland, and Gower than at any previous time, too many of the core texts of Middle English study are not easily and cheaply available to scholars and students. In the second area, Matthews himself has made an impressive step in the right direction, adding his

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South Atlantic Review 213

truly excellent British history of Middle English studies to Allen Frantzen's Desirefor Origins (1990), an account of Old English studies in Britain and the United States. Because the discipline of Middle English studies was negotiated not only among Anglophone scholars, but was an international and decidedly multi-lingual process, The Making of Middle English now needs to be complemented by similar investigations assess- ing especially the French and German contributions as well as the ex- changes between Anglophone and non-Anglophone scholars during the same formative periods. Considering the various national scholarly practices and changing nationalist tempers between the late eighteenth and the early twentieth century, such cross-national investigations of the process by which our field of specialty evolved should yield a great number of additional valuable insights.

Richard Utz, University of Northern Iowa

Extraordinag Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-Century Ameri- can Poetry. By Lorenzo Thomas. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2000. xiv + 271 pp. $39.95 (cloth); $19.95 (paper).

Connections drawn between African American poetics and domi- nant poetic movements too often represent black art as the imitative and dependent offspring of a larger American tradition. Not enough attention is awarded the inseparable and mutually dependent relation- ship of black art and American art at large. In Extraordinary Measures: Afrocentric Modernism and Twentieth-CentugAmerican Poetry, Lorenzo Tho- mas addresses this void. This literary history of modern African Ameri- can poetry asserts that black poetics has both influenced and been in- fluenced by American modernism. Thomas begins with an introduc- tory overview that summarizes the work and provides the definitions of "Afrocentric" and "modernism" that will frame his discussion in the chapters that follow. Defining Afrocentric as "a cultural frame of refer- ence regarding history" (5), he does not employ the term to denote a clearly defined or consciously constructed group philosophy or sensi- bility, but rather a tableau of views and responses that spring from shared racialized experiences of blacks in America. Similarly, Thomas casts a wide net with his definition of modernism. While he identifies modern- ism as a movement born out of a rejection of nineteenth-century gen- tility, Thomas invokes modernism as a historical period rather than a philosophical or ideological sensibility. He defines it broadly as "a logi- cal name for twentieth-century art and literature" (6).

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