Trigg: Shame and Honor

Stephanie Trigg. Shame and Honor: A Vulgar History of the Order of the Garter. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.

Reviewed by: Emily Griffiths Jones (egjones@mit.edu)

Although recent job lists have occasionally made me rue the day I chose as a graduate student to pursue Early Modern rather than medieval studies, Stephanie Trigg’s Shame and Honor made me delighted to be what I am: a scholar of another period who remains fascinated by the medieval, both in terms of its resonances throughout later eras and its enduring influence on contemporary popular culture. Trigg is a medievalist who aims in this book to build “a bridge between two disciplines that have sometimes seemed antithetical”—medieval studies and medievalism studies—and who successfully presents a vibrant example of how diverse fields of literary, historical, and cultural studies might speak to one another (11). Shame and Honor is an unconventional and ambitious history of the Order of the Garter from its foundation in the 1340s through the present day, one that flouts usual strictures on periodization and responds to the growing demand for scholarship that rethinks such boundaries.

Trigg seems to have chosen the Order of the Garter for her subject both out of personal enthusiasm for its strangeness and for its exemplary illustration of how the historical phenomena of the Middle Ages adapt, or are adapted, to later fetishizations of the medieval. Pointing to the Order’s “more or less continuous history of activity” since its founding, she proposes that it “resonates both backward and forward in time” as a medieval institution “and as an ongoing project of medievalism” (3, 5). Her book takes as its “repeated theme […] the necessary tensions between the Order’s periodic appeals to its medieval foundations, on the one hand, and its insistence, on the other, that it can update itself and remain responsive to the ever-changing imperatives of modernity” (6). Trigg is quick to note that Shame and Honor does not seek to offer “a straightforward or comprehensive narrative of the Order’s history” and in fact that it “works against conventional chronologies.” (14, 13). She characterizes it instead as “a symptomatic long history,” one which critically examines certain key moments when the Order considers its own odd origins and interrogates or reinvents its practices to suit its present needs (14). In addition to resisting the limits imposed by strict diachronic narrative, Trigg proposes that in order to fully grasp how the Order has transformed, we must explore it simultaneously “in historical, cultural, and imaginative terms”: accordingly, her analysis throughout the book rests on striking examples not just from history, but also from literature and popular culture (11). Shame and Honor is a “vulgar history” of the Order of the Garter because it depends both upon the sexuality inherent in the Order’s foundational myth—in which King Edward III glorifies an undergarment that has fallen from a lady’s leg—and upon unofficial popular impressions and interpretations of the Order.

The book is divided into three parts. The first, “Ritual Histories,” presents a roughly chronological account of the Order’s origins and its first few centuries. In chapter one, Trigg establishes the three concepts that will be crucial to the rest of her analysis: “ritual criticism,” the ongoing and often fraught conversation about the Order’s origins and practices; “mythic capital,” whereby the medieval period’s aura of mystery and romance continually regenerates the Order’s cultural status; and “medievalism,” the reimagining of the Middle Ages. Here, Trigg introduces the myth of the Order’s foundation, the enigmatic motto Honi soit qui mal y pense (“Shamed be he who thinks evil of it”), and the way both the myth and the motto entwine the concepts of honor and shame. The continuous history of the Order, Trigg suggests, is deceptive, since cultural senses of the honorable and the shameful are always in flux; however, the contentious discourse about the Order’s origins and ritual practices enhances its mythic capital, and so ensures the ongoing vitality of both the Order and debates surrounding it.

The second chapter rehearses what we know (and what we do not) about the Order’s medieval foundation and its central mythology; Trigg argues that the ambiguity of the motto, which “celebrates its own ambivalence,” and of the founding story contributes to the Order’s mythic capital by “seem[ing] to confer a kind of authority […] on those cunning or bold enough to decode” the occluded medieval “knowledge” (71, 68). Her case is bolstered by short readings of several early texts that reference the Order and explore the intertwining of shame and honor, femininity and masculinity, and sexuality and chivalry: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the 1460 romance Tirant Lo Blanc, and Polydor Vergil’s early sixteenth-century Anglica Historia. Trigg demonstrates how the “persistent fascination with” and “equal distrust of” the Order’s sexy origin stories “[generate] rather than [close] down interpretations” (65, 71).

In chapter three, Trigg considers the first few hundred years of historical commentaries on the Garter and how they critique and renegotiate the medieval past, balancing the Order’s mythic capital with the embarrassment engendered by its foundational eroticism (whether romantic and heterosexual or chivalric and homosocial) and by the temporary humiliation of the monarch. She suggests that “the very medievalness” that these histories must confront “plays an important role in the freedom of invention,” proposing that the Renaissance witnessed the “gradual development of a self-consciously modern scholarly method, one that takes active pleasure in sifting and sorting various medieval accounts” (106, 116). Early scholars of the Order and its rituals were both attracted to and made anxious by its medieval heritage, and by “the potential of medieval tradition to confer shame and honor” (123).

Part two, “Ritual Practices,” is less chronological and more thematic in its explorations of the Order’s medieval legacy. Chapter four looks closely at the concept of shame—the flip side of the Order’s capacity to distribute honor—through the ritual expulsion of its members. Such ritual, Trigg argues, reflects “the uneven survival of medieval chivalry in postmedieval culture” (128). The chapter incorporates both historical examples of the dismissal of disgraced knights, in which period-specific politics merge with medieval ritual practice through “stripping the knight of his chivalric accouterments,” and brief literary examples drawn from Sir Gawain, Malory’s Morte D’Arthur, and (with some reductiveness) Shakespeare’s I Henry IV (136). It also explores the potential shamefulness of too much ritual pomp, in which the honor of the Garter risks becoming ludicrous, and again addresses the relationship between shame and sex through unruly popular songs that mock “attempts to regulate the distribution of shame and honor” (165).

The fifth chapter considers historical moments of ritual reform and change when the Order challenges, debates, or reflects upon medievalist tradition. Here, Trigg presents a compelling narrative in resistance to “proud” histories of the Order that stress tradition, evolution, and continuity; instead, she emphasizes instances of rupture and forgetting (171). These include moments of reform, such as Edward VI’s anxious de-Catholicizing of medieval tradition, and (most interestingly) the highly irregular history of women in the Order before their formal admission under Elizabeth II. Trigg reminds us that the Order is highly capable of adaptation and social change without necessarily conforming an orderly or progressive social teleology.

Chapter six, which explores medievalism through gender and the embodied performance of wearing the Garter, is perhaps the book’s strongest and most exciting section, in which Trigg’s capacity for nuanced criticism and her commitment to a multidisciplinary approach are most richly evident. Here, she performs engrossing readings of visual art, examining how the monarch performs the bestowal of the Garter; a reading of film alongside historical example, conceptualizing a “queer Garter” as “a sign that inaugurates shifting sexualities and multiple temporalities” (212); readings of portraiture and funeral effigy, showing how both female and male bodies problematize and transform Garter traditions; and finally a reading of a novella, Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson, revisiting problems of shame and honor through wardrobe choices in early twentieth-century “dandy fiction.”

The third and final part of Shame and Honor, “Ritual Modernities,” integrates the first two parts’ chronological and thematic approaches. Chapter seven recounts the history of the Order in twentieth and twenty-first centuries, exploring the intersections of the medieval with the modern and postmodern. Trigg proposes, quite convincingly by now, that we might read the English monarchy’s “long history of overcoming shame, scandal, and political challenges”—sexual and otherwise—“as a long, continuous gloss on the Garter motto” with its “defiant magic” (251). She poses the question of “how medieval, now, is the Order of the Garter?”, considering contemporary issues of ritual performance, costume, and photographic portraiture, and answers “that the increasingly vague and shifting notion of ‘tradition’ [has] displace[d] the historical specificity of the Order’s medieval origins” (252, 263). Today, medievalism has sometimes become a form of play or pastiche, both for the monarchy and within the popular or public sphere. Ultimately, Trigg concludes, the Order’s role at any point in time, including today, is bound up with its beginnings: it can never fully “resolve the question of its origin, and will never be able to acknowledge the medievalism of the medieval thing at its heart” (275).

As someone who works in seventeenth century studies, I might occasionally have been grateful for a more straightforwardly chronological approach that granted more equitable attention to successive periods or regimes. For instance, while Trigg offers an interesting extended discussion of Edward VI’s sixteenth-century concern about the Order’s Catholic associations with Saint George, her treatment of Charles II’s seventeenth-century relationship to the Order is mostly limited to a brief comment on his reaffirmation of monarchy, and references to the Interregnum—and to what the “shame and honor” of the Order might have meant then—occur only in passing. Readers may find their own special areas of interest similarly underrepresented here. However, Trigg is forthright about the fact that her book is a collection of illuminating case studies rather than a comprehensive historical narrative, and it is a fascinating one. Her work successfully invites further scholarship by encouraging readers to ask their own questions about how the Order’s role in one circumstance might transform in another. While Shame and Honor’s ambitious project of considering six and a half centuries of Garter history may uncover more material through some eras, genres, and themes than through others, it introduces richly provocative ideas to scholars of any period with an interest in medievalism.

Emily Griffiths Jones
Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Chappell: Perilous Passages

Julie A. Chappell.  Perilous Passages: The Book of Margery Kempe, 1534-1934. Palgrave MacMillan, 2013.

Reviewed by Candace Robb (eccr14 at gmail dot com)

The one required course in my graduate program was Introduction to Graduate Research, designed to inspire and intimidate. The texts were the MLA Stylesheet, A Chicago Manual of Style, a pamphlet on the graduate research paper, and The Scholar Adventurers: enduring account of literature’s most famous research puzzles by Richard D. Altick.[1] We were to read Altick before the first class. A brilliant strategy: with chapter headings such as "The Secret of the Ebony Cabinet" and "Exit a Lady, Enter Another," Altick presented literary research as detective work.

Julie Chappell’s Perilous Passages: The Book of Margery Kempe, 1534-1934, brought back that sense of adventure for me, and it is no accident: as Altick echoed detective novels in his chapter titles, Chappell references the game of Clue (Cluedo) in her prologue: "Was it the Colonel in the Library with the candlestick? Or the Colonel in the ping pong cupboard with a box of matches? Like any good English mystery, this one began with a body purportedly found in the library of an English manor house belonging to a member of a gentry family of some antiquity" (xliii). The contradicting versions of the early twentieth-century discovery of a manuscript of The Book are fairly accurately described in those Clue-like questions. She carries this atmosphere of mystery and surprise through the book. I came away with a sense of wonder that such a manuscript, an affective account of a woman’s spiritual journey, survived the violent destruction of all that was deemed “popish” in the centuries after the manuscript’s completion. How it did is quite a story.

As Chappell explains in her "Proym," she did not start out to trace the journey of the manuscript. She was frustrated by the editors’ choices of extracts from Margery’s Book in The Norton Anthology of English Literature (1986 edition). Taken out of context, the excerpts "created a most extraordinary late medieval woman…for whom [the students in her survey class] could largely feel neither empathy nor sympathy" (xx). Wanting to provide such context, she reread the book in Middle English as well as reviewing current research on women’s spirituality in the late Middle Ages. Chappell’s proym chronicling her journey into Margery’s Book and its context is itself a brief, clear review of the literature. She came to see Margery and other pious laywomen as seeking "an authority with which to sanction their spiritual (and, by association, their earthly) lives [which] led [them]… to erase themselves through visionary experience, to become human palimpsests, spiritual beings written over the erasure of the earthly ones. Their authority, their voice would be understood to come from the highest auctor, God" (xxii). This was particularly important as Archbishop Arundel’s 1409 Constitutions made clear his abhorrence of women offering spiritual advice of any kind as it warned that vernacular versions of the Bible might permit "any old woman to usurp the office of teacher” and “dare to instruct men" (xxix).

But  her study took an unexpected turn when "a scribal ‘correction,’ the crossing out of ‘Pope’; in [a] litany of souls for which Kempe begged mercy" led Chappell to the British Library to see the manuscript of the book. "The manuscript of The Book of Margery Kempe was glossed and edited by rubricating hands from first leaf to last. Margery Kempe’s as yet unnamed sixteenth-century rubricators/editors made additions, deletions, glosses, symbolic drawings, and other enhancements…" (10). Chappell’s curiosity about the rubricators shifted her focus from Kempe’s life to the story of the manuscript itself. Beyond the two bookplates in the manuscript identifying the owner as Henry Bowden, born in 1754, and an earlier inscription on the verso side of the binding leaf facing fol. 1r identifying it as in the possession of the Carthusians of Mount Grace Priory in Yorkshire, we knew nothing of the whereabouts of this manuscript until Butler-Bowden brought it to the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1934.

Chappell finds that two separate individuals altered the manuscript—one working in the late fifteenth century, the other, the one who made "the last hurried marginal glosses and corrections," including the striking of the word "Pope," working slightly later, during the upheaval of Henry VIII’s religious reform. Comparing the hands with other manuscripts, Chappell identifies the two Carthusian scribes, and proposes the path by which the manuscript came to reside at Mount Grace. The later rubricator added a note to one of his marginal additions citing Richard Methley, a Carthusian mystic, as his source, a former vicar of Mount Grace whose work was similar to the books Margery Kempe claims to have "heard." His being referred to in the past tense provided Chappell with a date after Methley’s death for the first sixteenth-century rubricator of The Book (23).

To have come to reside at Mount Grace was key to the survival of Margery’s Book, as the Carthusian order held the copying and sharing of spiritual books in high regard, and Methley in particular translated into Middle English Marguerite Porete’s Mirror of Simple Souls, similar in its affective piety to Margery’s work.

Mount Grace itself was one of the last religious houses to be dissolved by Henry VIII, on December 19, 1539 (xxxviii). Discovering that Margery’s Book is not among the manuscripts listed as in the possession of Mount Grace at the time of its dissolution, Chappell searches for and finds a likely avenue of transmission, one that would bring the manuscript to the London Charterhouse. She includes a gut-wrenching account of the fate of the prominent members of the London Carthusian community, to emphasize in what reverence a member of the order, Everard Digby, held Margery’s Book, that he risked the fate of his less fortunate fellows to spirit the manuscript to the safety of a Popish recusant family.

In the chapter "Digbys, Erdeswicks, Bowdons, and Butler-Bowdons," Chappell outlines the genealogical path by which the manuscript was passed down through the centuries by Catholic recusants, documenting the marriages that led from Everard Digby in 1538, to the late eighteenth century Henry Bowden who pasted his bookplates in the manuscript, to Col. William Butler-Bowdon who discovered it tucked into a ping pong cabinet beside a fireplace in 1934.

From there the manuscript moved to the Victoria and Albert Museum, where it was placed into  the competent hands of the scholar Hope Emily Allen, who had the background to recognize what it was, "an incomparable record of ‘medieval pilgrim-routes [and] medieval social history [which] brings to life not only famous persons of the early fifteenth century, but also humble ones, at home and abroad’" (69). What I expected to be a triumphant end to the tale becomes the most ignoble part of The Book’s passage, a too-familiar battle in which an inexperienced but ambitious younger scholar (Sanford Brown Meech) chafes at the slow deliberation of his more experienced co-editor (Allen) and plays himself up to the Colonel, who is eager to gain credit for his family’s heroic preservation of such a find and easily joins in Meech’s impatience with Allen. In the end, Allen is pushed to the sidelines. It is an infuriating episode, but what good detective story has a happily ever after ending? 

Dr. Julie Chappell, Professor of English at Tarleton State University, has published scholarly texts, creative non-fiction, and poetry, and it is her ease in all three styles that makes Perilous Passages a pleasure to read. While thoroughly documenting each step of her research, she pays attention to pace and pauses for emphasis, summing up the pertinent details, inserting anecdotes about the more colorful characters whose lives were touched, sometimes unknowingly, by Margery Kempe’s Book.

That a manuscript of The Book of Margery Kempe survived now seems just short of a miracle to me. I wonder what other marvels of medieval piety we have lost, or what gems still lie hidden behind paneling or tucked beneath the false bottom of a cupboard in some ancient pile, waiting to be discovered.

Candace Robb

Independent scholar; author of the Owen Archer Mystery novels and, writing as Emma Campion, The King's Mistress and the forthcoming A Triple Knot. 

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[1] The Free Press, 1966. 

Sigu: Médiévisme et lumières

Sigu, Véronique. Médiévisme et lumières: le Moyen Age dans la ‘Bibliothèque universelle des romans'. Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, August 2013 (SVEC 2013:8).

Reviewed by Jessica Stacey, King’s College London (Jessica.stacey@kcl.ac.uk)

That the Middle Ages were not highly regarded by eighteenth-century French society is widely known. This is the age of Voltaire writing of the dismal, barbaric birth of Europe, of gothique as a byword for confusion and ugliness, reaching its apogee in the neo-Classicist French Revolution. However, it is also in the eighteenth century that French medievalist scholarship is born with the work of antiquarian La Curne de Sainte-Palaye, who wrote memoirs on chivalry and troubadour poetry which made their way to Horace Walpole’s library at Strawberry Hill.[1] Alongside this serious scholarship, medievalist (or medievalish) short stories were rapidly gaining in popularity. Paperback collections, or bibliothèques, such as the populist Bibliothèque bleue made folk tales and characters dating back to medieval romance cheaply available to an expanding reading public. It is amidst these contrasting strains of thought that, in 1775, the first volume of a new project, the Bibliothèque universelle des romans, is published. The title page is graced by an ambitious mission statement to which Véronique Sigu frequently returns over the course of her new study, Médiévisme et Lumières: le Moyen Age dans la ‘Bibliothèque universelle des romans’, and it is worth quoting this key passage at the outset: ‘La Bibliothèque universelle des romans, ouvrage périodique dans lequel on donne l’analyse raisonnée des romans anciens et modernes, français ou traduits dans notre langue; avec des anecdotes et des notices historiques et critiques concernant les auteurs ou leurs ouvrages; ainsi que les mœurs, les usages du temps, les circonstances particulières et relatives, et les personnages connus, déguisés ou emblématiques.’[2]

The BUR is interested in the process of categorisation. This process was key to the formation of what Roger Chartier, in a well-known article which Sigu cites more than once, dubbed ‘libraries without walls’: encyclopaedic or exemplary collections of texts, in vogue since the seventeenth century.[3] As a universal library of novels, the BUR posits eight distinct classes according to which all novels can be ordered, and the second of the eight categories is romans de chevalerie.[4] It is on these extraits (extracts) or miniatures and their analyse raisonnée that Sigu focusses, also drawing occasionally on the third category of ‘historical’ novels, to elucidate her thesis on the role of the BUR in crafting a place for the medieval in both popular and intellectual thought.

The Bibliothèque universelle des romans has garnered criticism for its pretensions, which were lofty: the editors, working from the Marquis de Paulmy’s extensive collection of manuscripts and with the help of the antiquarian La Curne de Sainte-Palaye, aimed at a more sophisticated audience than the Bibliothèque bleue but, as Lise Andries has shown, BUR extracts were often based not on manuscripts but on the Bibliothèque bleue itself.[5] Sigu acknowledges this charge, but seeks to elevate the collection’s status for both medievalists and eighteenth-century specialists by emphasising both the project’s commitment to ‘serious’, manuscript-based medievalism (especially in its earlier years), as well as the close ties between those working on the project within philosophe as well as antiquarian circles. Sigu makes the philosophical stakes of her project clear in the introduction: as the philosophes often mocked erudition and erudite scholars were frequently hostile to the philosophes, the possibility of the BUR as a site of crossover renders the periodical interesting to those who focus on the history of ideas as well as to those who focus on the history of medieval reception. If accepted readings of intellectual currents in the eighteenth century see reason (philosophy) opposed to memory (erudition) in epistemology, and reason triumphant with far-reaching implications, Sigu seeks to establish the BUR as a location in which these opposed forces might, to some extent, be reconciled (15). Hence the work’s title, which unites rather than opposes médiévisme and lumières – medievalism and Enlightenment.

To elucidate this claim, Sigu begins her analysis with portraits of the two major personalities behind the BUR, the Marquis de Paulmy (who guided the publication from 1775 to 1778) and the Comte de Tressan (who took the reins after Paulmy’s somewhat acrimonious and mysterious departure). Sigu situates the two men in French intellectual life with reference to the salons they attended. We learn that both would have mixed extensively with Montesquieu and Voltaire at the salon of Madame Tencin, as well as attending the salon of Madame Doublet where the antiquarian La Curne de Sainte-Palaye made his intellectual base. She reveals the surprising fact that the two men were closely linked with the philosophe par excellence, Voltaire, who was invited to the editorial board and seemed, at the age of eighty, regretful of having to decline (17). Whilst acknowledging that there is a schism between the time of Paulmy and the time of Tressan – the loss of the former’s extensive library as a resource seems to have led to a more slapdash, less antiquarian approach – she argues that the Bibliothèque universelle des romans took two major ideological stances towards the Middle Ages, created under Paulmy’s reign and continued, even reinforced, under Tressan’s. These stances are, firstly, a particular ideology of fiction and history which seeks to rehabilitate the novel or romance through its historical content, and secondly, the creation of the medieval as a site from which ideal masculine models, both aristocratic and patriotic, can be drawn.

In arguing for a rehabilitation of romans through their historical content, Sigu is engaging with an anxiety foundational to eighteenth-century medievalism. Novels and romances become valuable for their faithful portrayal of the customs and morals of past times; the BUR was following La Curne de Sainte-Palaye who, in his Mémoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie (developed during the 1750s) had set out an extensive defence of using fictional texts to ground assertions about history and about actual medieval life. These same novels or romances were, however, considered potentially dangerous, and this is the crux of the BUR’s engagement with fiction – what are its safe uses and what, when making an extrait or miniature should be excluded, or even rewritten?

In a fascinating discussion of the implications of the term extrait, Sigu convincingly argues that we must take its origins in chemistry seriously. The BUR generally masked the more violent or sexual aspects of medieval texts, figured as dangerous, inflammatory, or simply poor-taste: medieval writing must be ‘distilled’ to recover only the useful or harmlessly diverting. Infamous anti-philosophe Fréron, reviewing the BUR in 1775, praised the process in intriguingly chemical language: ‘D’après ce que j’en ai vu, j’ose dire que tous ces ouvrages lus dans la Bibliothèque en question, non seulement n’ont plus rien de dangereux, mais qu’ils contiennent les plus grandes leçons de sagesse et d’excellents préservatifs contre les séductions du vice. Le poison secret qui pourrait s’y trouver renfermé reste dans le creuset de l’analyse, laquelle se borne à donner l’esprit et, pour me servir de l’expression même des auteurs, la miniature de chaque roman: miniature dans laquelle n’entrent que les traits propres à caractériser l’ouvrage, et d’où sont bannis toutes les images qui ne seraient pas avouées par la décence la plus rigoureuse.’ (quoted 120-121, my emphasis)[6] As Sigu notes, what is conserved is the fond historique (historical foundation), and what is left out is the imagination en délire (fevered imagination) of pre-modern writers.

The primary issue that can be taken with Sigu’s analysis of this process concerns how far it can be considered a rehabilitation of the novel/romance form. She qualifies that this rehabilitation is not wholehearted, comporting a moralising taint that the reader may find paradoxal, but the purification implied by this process of extraction – which results in something which no longer has the form of a novel or romance – may be more significant than Sigu allows. On the one hand, Tressan is happy to speak of the roman de chevalerie as valuable for having ‘point de modèle dans l’antiquité. Elle est dûe au génie des François ; & tout ce qui a paru, de ce genre, chez les autres Peuples de l’Europe, a été postérieur aux premiers Romans que la France a produits, & n’en a été, pour ainsi dire, qu’une imitation.’[7] On the other, content is pruned, and the form itself undergoes extensive modification to produce an easily digestible miniature.

Sigu’s second major argument revolves around the changing ideological function of the Middle Ages in France towards the end of the eighteenth century. She identifies two primary deployments of a medieval ideal in the Bibliothèque universelle des romans, roughly splitting between Paulmy’s and Tressan’s directorships but present throughout the publication’s history. The first is the chevalier as critique of and model for the modern aristocrat, and the second is medieval France as the birthplace of the modern French nation. Concurrent to the textual and narrative harmonisation practised by the editors, there thus runs a harmonisation of power dynamics between rulers and their vassals, which tends to recast kings as absolute monarchs and knights as absolutely loyal – not through a sense of feudal obligation, but through an anachronistic nationalism (228). She quotes Tressan who, blending aristocracy and national progression, figured chevalerie as a civilising aristocratic force pushing society forward (139). Of course, not all knightly characteristics fit this assessment. In a century which had forbidden duelling, the central role of single combat was downplayed (147), whilst the religious attitudes of the knights, uncomfortably close to superstition and fanaticism for eighteenth-century thinkers, were also modified or skipped over, even when the Grail Quest is at issue.

Rehabilitators of the medieval past are interested in grounding French national character, and particularly their gallantry in love, in the Middle Ages, but most (aside from the notable exceptions of Boulainvilliers and his followers) seek to divert attention from medieval political organisation. In common with other eighteenth-century retellings of medieval tales (Baculard d’Arnaud’s Nouvelles historiques, for example), the BUR expands (or even fabricates) a principal role for individual sentiment, and elides the troubling non-individuation of the medieval hero/heroine (‘son étrangéité’, 177) and the primarily social function of courtly love. Furthermore, love of the eighteenth-century kind is used to mask medieval political concerns: Blanchefleur’s feudal war in Chrétien de Troye’s Conte du Graal is rewritten with the damsel besieged by a spurned suitor (169). Sigu also demonstrates that greater emphasis was placed, throughout the BUR’s treatment of the medieval past, on conjugal rather than extramarital love, and convincingly argues for a sexist undercurrent restricting female agency (notably, 176 on Guinevere and Lancelot in Le Chevalier de la charrette).

A minor criticism, but one pertinent to medievalists, is that Sigu’s medieval secondary references are rather venerable, whereas her eighteenth-century secondary sources are much more up-to-date. This may, of course, be because she deals with well-established medieval texts, whilst the study of eighteenth-century medievalism is in the process of blossoming. This imbalance has no particular negative impact on the investigation, but it might have been interesting to reference more recent work by, for example, Carolyn Dinshaw on nineteenth-century amateur medievalism. However, this is not to say that her work does not engage with problems of contemporary relevance to medievalists for, by situating the BUR’s extract of The Perilous Cemetery in relation to the periodical’s editorial technique more generally, she draws conclusions important to the manuscript tradition of the medieval text. In contrast to the text’s editor Nancy Black, who judges from the great disparities between the BUR version and the extant manuscripts that a lost manuscript must have been known in the eighteenth century, Sigu demonstrates that the variations from extant manuscripts to the BUR version are no greater than those extracts for which the source manuscript is known for certain, refuting the lost-manuscript theory (discussed 147-151). Another moment which will bring a smile to the faces of medievalists is when she cautions her readers with one of the fundamental elements of engagement with medieval literary tradition, but applied to the BUR: ‘évitons [...] de juger trop sévèrement le manque de fidélité de la reécriture à l’original mediéval, nous imposerions des critères tout à fait anachroniques à ces travaux d’adaptation’[8] (254). A medievalist Enlightenment indeed.

Sigu has undertaken a formidable amount of research, supporting her analysis of the ideological agenda of the BUR by citing reviews from many contemporary journaux which back up her assertions, suggesting a widespread engagement with, and appetite for, the brand of medievalism the BUR was selling. Her critical engagement with the implications of the metaphor of chemical extraction is, overall, highly compelling. Her extended analysis of the technique consistent throughout the BUR’s publication (no matter who held the reins) of distilling ‘unwieldy’ or ‘barbaric’ medieval texts down to a particular conception of their essence, and then adding a great deal of moral or historical commentary to produce a more coherent image of chivalry, builds a convincing picture of a publication seeking to enhance the chevalier for eighteenth-century reappropriation – though this by, ultimately, denigrating medieval literary production. In identifying a move, as the publication evolves, from the medieval figured as a place from which to criticise modernity to the medieval as modernity’s origin point (244), Sigu situates the Bibliothèque universelle des romans at the heart of the current revaluation of what medievalism meant to the Enlightenment.

Jessica Stacey

King’s College London

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[1] Mémoires sur l’ancienne chevalerie; Considerée comme un établissement politique et militaire. 3 vols. (Paris: Chez Duchesne, 1759).
Histoire littéraire des troubadours, (Paris: Chez Durand, 1774) (Horace Walpole’s annotated copy held at the British Library, class-mark 1464 d.1).

[2] The Bibliothèque universelle des romans: periodical giving a reasoned analysis of novels ancient and modern, French or in translation, including anecdotes and historical and critical annotations regarding authors and texts, as well as the morals and customs of the past, particular and related circumstances, and known, disguised or symbolic characters.

[3] Chartier, Roger, ‘Libraries Without Walls’ in Representations, No. 42, Special Issue: Future Libraries (Spring, 1993), 38-52.

[4] As Sigu notes on 197, the term ‘roman’ (novel) as used by the BUR includes many forms not covered by modern usages – medieval romances, contes, even poetic retellings of history.

[5] Andries, Lise, ‘La Bibliothèque bleue et la redécouverte des romans de chevalerie au dix-huitième siècle’, in Medievalism and manière gothique in Enlightenment France, Damian-Grint, Peter (ed.), (Oxford: SVEC, 2006) 52-67.

[6] ‘From what I have so far seen, I dare say that all the works in this Bibliothèque not only no longer contain dangerous material, but that highly edifying lessons and effective defences against the seductions of vice are to be found therein. The secret poison which could have been hidden within is left behind in the crucible of the analysis, which restricts itself to portraying the spirit or, to use the favourite term of the authors, the miniature of each novel: miniature into which are admitted only those traits necessary to convey the character of the work, and from which are banished any images which the most rigorous modesty would scruple to avow.’

[7] ‘no model whatsoever in Antiquity. It was a French invention, and all other works of this genre which appeared in Europe were posterior to those first novels/romances produced by the French, and were thus imitations of them.’ Tressan, le Comte de, ‘Discours préliminaire’, in Corps d’extraits de romans de chevalerie, (Paris: Pissot, 1782)

[8] ‘let us avoid judging the lack of fidelity to the medieval original in the retelling too harshly, for this would be to impose utterly anachronistic criteria upon these adaptations.’