The historiographical border between the medieval and early modern has come under increasing critical pressure. Gordon McMullan and David Matthews's outstanding collection is a significant contribution to this important work, with both medievalists and early modernists interrogating the complex interplay of continuity and rupture in literary history. These essays successfully negotiate close analysis of cultural formations with self-reflection on disciplinary constraints, offering a range of fertile avenues for exploration of the possibilities created by the recalibrating of temporal frontiers.
The volume opens with a pair of essays on periodization, juxtaposing the desire to draw historical lines with the consciousness of their arbitrariness. James Simpson shares the historiographical insight gained from writing across the 1534 “barrier of the Act of Supremacy”—that his methodology was the product of a “revolutionary” logic such as the 1530s cultural shift that produced the very idea of a Middle Ages (17). Hoping to steer medievalists away from an interdisciplinarity alienating them from their departmental colleagues, Simpson argues against synchronic medievalism. In pondering a path out of philological practice that distances us from objects to the extent that we historicize them, Simpson argues that reflection on the artificiality and institutional centrality of the medieval-modern divide will radically transform both periods. Deanne Williams examines Robert Greene's deployment of unstable classical allusions and literary conventions in Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay in order to expose the artificiality of the Reformation's construction of the Middle Ages. Williams shows that, even as Greene contrasts medieval superstitiousness with modern rationalism, he deconstructs such a past-present binary through Margaret's idiosyncratic deployment of literary topoi and by fashioning Bacon as a medieval “Renaissance man” (36).
The conflicted relation of modernity to its immediate past is tracked in two essays focused on editorial work. Larry Scanlon demonstrates medieval-modern continuity in Robert Crowley's 1550 editions of Piers Plowman, analyzing a poetico-ethical program shared by poet and editor that escapes criticism focused on Crowley's Protestant zeal. Scanlon shows how the promotion of vernacular literacy and righteous social action render Crowley's prefaces and paratext part of the Piers Plowman tradition, while bringing assessments of Langland's social conservatism into serious question. David Matthews argues that Thomas Speght's editions of Chaucer feature the modes of “philological absence” and “remembered presence” proposed by James Simpson (74–75). Matthews presents a Speght philologically anxious to restore a Chaucer canon threatened by modern editing and by the ravages of time, even as he fashions a receptive audience for his scholarship by linking Chaucer with Lancastrianism and gentility.
Three essays target the fantasy of an ex nihilo construction of the modern English nation, pointing to continuities in the circulation of cultural capital. Stephanie Trigg analyzes early modern inquiry into the origins of the motto of the Order of the Garter, showing how “romanticized” and “sexualized” accounts such as Virgil's are simultaneously invoked and displaced by scholars seeking a “sober,” military origin (92). Trigg analyzes the coupling of popularity and femininity in antiquarian scholarship, while exploring the fascination with the sovereign's power to transform the small and sordid into the seminal and noble. Anke Bernau argues that the unruly females of the Albina myth serve as “barbaric” foils against which medieval and modern historians assert English civility, while showing that the early modern reception of Boudica's story ties England's modernity to its felicitous colonization by Rome (116). Gordon McMullan investigates stagings of early British myth in plays by Thomas Middleton and Anthony Brewer, which disclose complex layers of identity in a British “colonial history” produced by multiple invasions (122). After analyzing efforts to contain female centrality in treatments of Albina, McMullan traces the return of repressed feminine origins in John Fletcher and Philip Massinger's The Sea-Voyage.
Two essays on the rise of modern geography point to its material links with medieval maps and ruins. Bernhard Klein demonstrates the persistence of the sacrality and corporeality of medieval maps through analysis of Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine, whose vain efforts to eradicate medieval maps to make room for an abstract New Geography illuminate a wider unease about modern geography's self-dislocation from the “comfort and community” of medieval cartographic allegory (144). Jennifer Summit explores Leland's Itinerary as the product not of a destructive Renaissance alteritism but ravid Wallace's cautionary comment that intense focus on the Reformation's “epoch-making” force may reinforce a monolithic view of the Middle Ages (222). Cathy Shrank presents John Bale as a “Janus figure” looking to the medieval for his textual materials, even as he deploys new antiquarian methodology and print technology to help construct modernity (181). Shrank argues that Bale's “cyclical” historiography, based on an agonistic light-dark binary, undermines the literary historical periodization to which his work contributes (180). Exploring Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, Sarah Beckwith reads the Duke's transformation of confession into intelligence gathering as the sign of a penitential world emptied of interiority by the abolition of auricular confession, which renders penance exclusively public and punitive. Beckwith argues that Shakespeare subverts the medieval legacy of antifraternalism common in anti-Catholic theater, using the friar-disguised Duke to figure the modern, surveilling sovereign as the true “wolf in sheep's clothing” (201). Patricia Badir explores Mary Magdalene as a figure of the “ghostly poetics of presence” in the works of Nicholas Breton and Aemilia Lanyer (211), who each manage the reader response of Mary and a literary patroness to figure the way readers themselves figure Christ's presence. McMullan and Matthews's collection offers rich and rewarding reflections on current reformulations of literary history, creating space for critical conversation on and beyond the disintegrating medieval-modern divide.
