Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literatureby Emily Steiner

Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature by Emily SteinerReview by: Eileen A. JoyThe Sixteenth Century Journal, Vol. 36, No. 2 (Summer, 2005), pp. 519-521Published by: The Sixteenth Century JournalStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20477400 .

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Book Reviews 519

Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature. Emily Steiner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 266 pp. $60.00. ISBN 0 521-82484-2

REVIEWED BY: Eileen A. Joy, Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville

As Emily Steiner explains in her book, by the mid-fourteenth century the legal docu ment was one of England's principal texts and possibly the only text readily available to every social class. Recent years have seen a proliferation of scholarship addressing the importance of legal literacy and "documentary culture" in medieval English society, and Steiner's book is an important contribution to a field that has mainly concentrated on delineating the ways in which legal texts were appropriated by the ruling and moneyed classes in order to recon figure and strengthen their power and authority, and also on highlighting the ways in which the uneducated and peasant classes creatively utilized those same texts in order to empower themselves-see, for example, Robert Palmer's English Law in the Age of the Black Death, 1348-1381:A Transformation of Governance and Law (Chapel Hill: University of North Caro lina Press, 1993) and Steven Justice's Writing and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: Uni versity of California Press, 1994) respectively. Although we now have a comprehensive picture of the role of legal documents in the juridical and political realms of later medieval England, no one, according to Steiner, has really attended to the function of legal documents in literary practice. Ultimately, Steiner wants to attend to the ways in which medieval English culture's understanding of "textuality" can be glimpsed in literature's "reflexive moments" and also in its legal documents, such as charters, testaments, pardons, letters patent, and the like, and she coins the term "documentary poetics" to describe what she calls "the intersec tion between documentary culture and late medieval literature" (10). It is precisely at this intersection, Steiner asserts, that we can see the emergence of unique relationships between institutional and poetic voices, as well as between material and textual culture. Therefore, documentary culture in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England was never static or fixed, but represented an ever-changing series of questions about the ways that legal texts per formed socially-as symbols, objects, and monuments-which, in turn, provided literary artists with "a means of inventing new relationships between languages, genres, identities, and communities" (13).

Part 1 of the book comprises two chapters and is titled "Documentary Poetics." In chapter 1, "Bracton, Deguileville, and the Defense of Allegory," Steiner draws connections between Henry de Bracton's thirteenth-century legal treatise De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae and the French monk Guillaume de Deguileville's popular fourteenth-century alle gorical dream visions, the Pelerinages (which were very popular, in translation, among English court poets of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries). More specifically, Steiner argues that the theories of legal person and documentary will that Bracton developed in his treatise were used by Deguileville (without citing Bracton specifically) in order to

make a case for the role of personification allegory in penitential narratives and spiritual development, and in the process also to theorize the genre of vernacular religious poetry.

Most interesting here is Steiner's focus on how both authors-one a lawyer, the other a poet-developed theories of charters and commissions that highlight their ritual perfor mance as material signs and also public sites through which subjectivity becomes legal action, and thereby also called attention to the deeply social aspects of the formal concerns of a nascent English documentary poetics. In chapter 2, "Lyric, Genre, and the Material Text," Steiner turns to the Charters of Christ (1350-1500), a large corpus of Passion lyrics in which



520 Sixteenth CenturyJournal XXXVI/2 (2005)

Christ's body is conceived as a bloody charter granting salvation to true penitents. Steiner argues that the Charters represent "a particularly fascinating experiment in English documen tary poetics, the goal of which was to reframe the aspirations of the Middle English lyric" (53). By comparing Christ's body to a charter, these lyrics utilize documents in order to

mediate between Christ's absence and the presence of Christ's guarantee of the New Law (much like real charters mediated between absent legal actors and present legal action), and the lyrics, when read, then also became, quite literally, a social contract.

Part 2, "Langland's Documents," comprises two chapters: "Piers Plowman and the Archive of Salvation" and "Writing Public: Documents in the Piers Plowman Tradition." As has been well noted by other scholars, Piers Plowman contains a plethora of legal documents and proceedings, and even conceives of the role of the divine (and evil) in human life as a series of fictive legal documents. It is Steiner's aim in chapter 3 to show how Langland's doc uments, particularly Truth's Pardon, portray how the transhistorical experience of the divine could be apprehended through the material practices of documentary culture. Most inter esting here is Steiner's reading of the scene in which Piers tears Truth's Pardon in half, for this has been very contentious among scholars of the poem, many of whom view it as Lang land's critique of the church's system of indulgences. Steiner argues instead for the literary Pardon as a true (albeit metaphoric) chirographum dei-a soteriological contract that echoes the Athanasian Creed-and Piers's tearing of it as an actual enactment of the contract that

mimics the ritual medieval practice of tearing legal chirographs, or deeds, in half, in order to distribute them to the legal actors and to ensure that the unique deed could not be forged and altered; therefore, the poem ultimately explodes the difference between history and alle gory, a provocative argument, indeed. In chapter 4, Steiner argues for the influence of Piers Plowman's documentary poetics upon diverse post-Langlandian writings, such as the 1381 rebel "John Ball" letters and the alliterative dream-vision Mum and the Soothsegger (ca. 1400).

Part 3, "Identity, Heterodoxy, Documents," comprises two chapters: "Lollard Commu nity and the Charters of Christ" and "Lollard Rhetoric and the Written Record: Margery Baxter and William Thorpe." In chapter 5, Steiner argues that the Charters of Christ-what she calls "a document equivalent to Scripture" (12)-offered Lollards a model of spiritual community untainted by what they viewed as a corrupt and illegitimate ecclesiastical author ity. Further, the Charters provided Lollard preachers and writers with a documentary poetics

which allowed them to challenge orthodoxy, construct an oppositional documentary polemic, and thereby reconfigure salvation theology. In chapter 6, Steiner wants to look again at oppositional polemic, but from the angle of religious identity, rather than spiritual community, and she shows how two Lollards on trial in the early fifteenth century, Margery Baxter and Williams Thorpe, "purposefully disfigured the rhetoric of trial documents and proceedings to cultivate their own heterodox polemic" (12), and therefore thwarted the institutional church's misrepresentation of Lollard belief in court documents. In an epilogue to the book, "My lordys lettyr & the seel of Cawntyrbery," Steiner extends the argument of chapter 6 to The Book of Margery Kempe in order to show how one individual gathered and appropriated government documents, such as letters of safe conduct and credence, in order to authenticate her orthodoxy, and in which appropriation we can see the relationship between documentary and literary textuality, identity, and self-presentation in the late Mid dle Ages.

Steiner's book is an important contribution, not only to the study of Piers Plowman and its use of legal documents in relation to salvation history and to what might be called the development of a distinctly English moral and documentary (and even radical) poetics, but



Book Reviews 521

also to our understanding, more generally, of how documents "signified" within medieval literature and society, and allowed medieval English authors, as well as religious reformers, to imagine and enact new relationships between diplomatic and poetic letters, ecclesiastical authority and spiritual identity, text and self.

Visions of Politics. Quentin Skinner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Complete set, /130.00. ISBN 0-521-81382-4.Vol. 1, Regarding Method. 209 pp. /547.50. ISBN 0-521-58105-2.Vol. 2, Renaissance Virtues. 461 pp. /47.50. ISBN 0-521-58106-O.Vol. 3, Hobbes and Civil Science. 386 pp. ?47.50. ISBN 0-521 81368-9.

REVIEWED BY: Mark Jurdjevic, University of Ottawa

In Visions of Politics, Quentin Skinner, regius professor of history at Cambridge Univer sity, has revised and reprinted a sizeable collection of his essays, many now classics, along with a few new offerings. In these essays one sees the trajectory of his formidable career as a his torian of early modern political thought and as a polemical, sometimes stubborn, interlocu tor in numerous methodological quarrels about the craft of intellectual history.The volumes are divided into the three subjects to which Skinner has devoted his energies over the past three decades.Volume 1 contains ten essays that chart Skinner's methodological arguments, volume 2 contains fourteen essays in which Skinner investigates what he sees as the most important political development of the Renaissance, the revival of a neo-roman ideology of liberty, and volume 3 contains twelve essays on the political thought ofThomas Hobbes, the

most influential early modern opponent of the Renaissance idea of self-government. Although he has written four books, and edited at least four more, Skinner nevertheless

remains an essayist at heart. Over three decades, Skinner has written dazzling essays on an impressively wide variety of early modern subjects, including seminal statements on English, French, and Italian history. His theoretical essays on the craft of intellectual history have been no less influential; with the institutionalization of Skinner's agenda in "the Cambridge school," it is fair to say that he has been at the heart of the most significant debates on the practice of intellectual history for the past twenty years. As a result, most of the essays reprinted in Visions are already familiar to anyone working in early modern history and the history of ideas. Broadly summarized, the essays in volumes 2 and 3 of Visions chart Skinner's "overarching historical interest ... in comparing two contrasting views we have inherited in the modern West about the nature of our common life" (1:viii). The first vision of politics belongs to the Renaissance republicans, who conceptualized sovereignty as the property of the people, whose major unit of analysis was the citizen, and who understood liberty as inseparable from self-rule.The second vision of politics belongs to Thomas Hobbes, the mas ter architect who attempted to "unbuild" the political assumptions of the Renaissance. In Hobbes' vision, sovereignty was the exclusive property of the state, no meaningful distinc tions existed between subject and citizen, and liberty was in no way contingent upon self rule or participation in making the laws that bind polity and populace. The relationship between these two visions of politics is at the heart of all of Skinner's best essays.

At the risk of having missed the forest for the trees, I would like to explain why, as a Renaissance historian, I found reading Visions a somewhat disappointing process. After rereading Skinner's constellation of arguments from the broad perspective made possible by their retrospective reprinting in Visions, many now seem less, rather than more, persuasive.

