Pérez: The Myth of Morgan la Fey

Pérez, Kristina, The Myth of Morgan la Fey. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. Pp. 262.

Reviewed by Kristi J. Castleberry (kristi.castleberry@gmail.com)

Morgan la Fey is a slippery, shadowy figure. She hurts Arthur and she heals Arthur; she is the enemy of the Round Table and she is the only hope that it may return. She is beautiful and powerful and terrifying. Kristina Pérez's The Myth of Morgan la Fey takes on the ambitious project of grappling with Morgan in myth and text and film and popular culture, easily moving between ancient and medieval and modern sources in the process. Pérez states in her preface that, "[b]y exploring the shifting portrayal of Morgan from Celtic Sovereignty Goddess to cartoon super-villain, we will find that real meanings and definitions are located in the place between two extremes," and she does keep well to this purpose throughout the book (xii). The historical breadth of the project renders it particularly appropriate to the topic of medievalism, since it gives such a thorough account of both the medieval stories and how those sources have been reimagined by later periods.

The preface features a strong authorial voice. Pérez discusses her first encounter with Morgan la Fey when she was an insecure thirteen-year-old who discovered Marion Zimmer Bradley's The Mists of Avalon. She mentions that, as a medievalist, "the admission that you might have first developed a love for your subject from a fantasy novel ... is a guilty secret that many of us share" (xi). By sharing that secret with us, Pérez creates a personalized tone that is rare in scholarly monographs. This breakdown between the professional and personal seems particularly appropriate for a work that concerns the limiting binaries forced upon Morgan and other female figures. She explains that her goal is "to make an original contribution to the academic scholarship surrounding this transformative character and to bring Morgan la Fey to a wider audience of Arthurian students and enthusiasts alike" (xiii). She thus frames the book for an audience both within and outside of academia. Because the sense of Pérez herself is so strong in the preface, I was surprised that the "I" didn't continue in the rest of the book. The tone becomes, from the introduction until the end, much more formal and distanced, shifting to the third person and plural first person. The preface creates such a strong sense of who the author is that I missed that personal voice as I continued reading.

The book's introduction begins with the end of the story—Camelot has fallen and "Morgan la Fay is the last one standing" (1). Whether or not she is described as an enemy to Arthur and the Round Table, Morgan is still a figure of healing and hope in the end. Pérez traces this complicated characterization back to the figure of the Celtic Sovereignty Goddess whose "dual function as kingmaker and death-dealer" the rest of the book explores (2). The introduction does a nice job of laying out a complex history of both Morgan specifically and the sovereignty goddess more generally, and the deft way with which Pérez moves between a wide range of material is impressive. The introduction also sets up the psychoanalytical framework that will be the primary lens of the book. She explains that "[i]n the same way as pioneering psychoanalysts such as Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung turned to myth to inform their understanding of interpersonal relationships, we will use psychoanalysis to understand myth itself" (9). This statement seems a bit cyclical, and I found myself wanting more explanation about why this methodology is useful. What can psychoanalysis offer myth in particular? The first two chapters attempt to answer this question.

The first chapter convincingly argues that the split between Morgan la Fey and the Dame du Lac comes from the inability to reconcile the different aspects of the Morgan figure (mother and lover, healer and destroyer). The chapter introduces psychoanalyst Melanie Klein's concept of the "Oresteian Position," which becomes a central idea for the remainder of the text. As Pérez explains, "[a]ttempts by our heroes to contain their Oresteian Mothers result in either perversion (a defense against her), or psychosis (the full negative impact of the Oresteian Position)" (16). In some ways the book becomes more about the masculine anxieties about women than about Morgan herself, but perhaps that is what makes the subject so relevant.

The second chapter introduces Slavoj Žižek's concept of "courtly masochism," which "attempts to compensate for the reduction of Woman to phantasy" (35). Pérez argues that Sovereignty Goddesses and Fairy Mistresses from Celtic and Breton sources complicate this notion because in these cases "the Woman literally is a phantasy figure" (36). This chapter, like the first, is more focused on setting up the book’s psychoanalytic framework than on Morgan herself, but it does define the terms with which the book will discuss Morgan.

With chapter three the book begins to delve more directly into medieval materials. This chapter discusses Morgan as a monstrous mother and connects her to the Mélusine tradition, since Mélusine "remains the image of monstrous motherhood par excellence, and because she and Morgan share common Celtic origins" (55). Pérez shows us how Mélusine transforms back and forth between two different forms, while Morgan "is cut into two separate personages" (59). The examples of these figures in the chapter show how tensions between the roles of mother and lover result in literal splitting. Instead of recognizing more complex possibilities for identity that allow for women to be both mothers and lovers, the traditions of both Morgan and Mélusine attempt to reassert the desired split categories.

After the chapter on monstrous mothers, it makes sense that the fourth chapter concerns divine mothers, and it explores the Dame du Lac and the Virgin Mary in relation to Morgan. Since the Dame du Lac is a mother to Lancelot without having given birth to him, she is allowed to be a mother without having been compromised by sexuality and childbirth: "she is whole, like the Virgin Mary" (75). The Dame du Lac is thus the good mother to Morgan’s bad one. Since Morgan also heals Arthur and the Dame du Lac also traps Merlin, I am unsure about the simple dichotomy of Morgan and Dame du Lac as bad and good mother respectively, but Pérez does acknowledge that depictions of the Dame du Lac trapping Merlin ultimately complicate her role. I would have liked to hear even more about the implications of the Dame du Lac being a bad mother as well as a good one, but Pérez nonetheless shows that the primary focus on each of these figures tends to reinforce that splitting between bad and good mother.

The fifth chapter shifts focus to examine Gawain and the perennial question of what women want. The chapter begins with Mary's role as intercessor, which connects back to the chapter on divine mothers and leads nicely into a discussion of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The pull between the power of Mary and Morgan in the poem fits nicely with the category of Oresteian Mother, and the chapter provides a new understanding of the complex binary between Morgan and the Dame du Lac as well, since even Mary's role is complicated in Gawain and the Green Knight. After all, Gawain's prayer for shelter reveals the very castle where Morgan resides and plans to test him, and thus "they are both agents of Gawain's testing" (115). Again I would like more analysis of the contradictions, though I think that the sheer breadth of material covered by the chapter (and the book) makes it inevitable that some moments will leave readers wanting more.

Chapter six takes on Morgan's role in the next major Arthurian text, Malory's Morte D'Arthur, where “Morgan la Fey reaches her zenith as a nefarious figure determined to destroy Camelot" (137). Yet, as the chapter also points out, Morgan remains the one to conduct Arthur to Avalon. Since the mother/lover opposition has been important to Pérez's framework, there could have been more explicit discussion of the dichotomy between this healer aspect and Morgan's sexual assertiveness. The chapter does a wonderful job of connecting both her sexual advances toward men (and the way in which women give and take swords such as Excalibur) back to the sovereignty goddesses discussed earlier. The chapter also makes clear how Morgan and Nymue both function as part of this tradition. Though they work against each other, they also serve similar roles in the text. Pérez addresses in detail some of my questions about the Dame du Lac from chapter four when she discusses Nymue's imprisonment of Merlin. Nymue may be Morgan's opponent, and she may work for Arthur more than against him, but she and Morgan both hold similarly powerful positions in the text.

Chapter seven, which discusses how the tradition developed in the Victorian period, explains how Nymue became Vivien. Tennyson depicts Vivien's entrapment of Merlin as an illustration of the dangerously sexualized and educated woman. Pérez explains that there was not only a dichotomy between good and bad women in Victorian society, but also between the Fallen Woman, “depicted in Victorian society as a passive victim,” and the femme fatale, “an active subject, a perpetrator” (163). The chapter argues that Vivien “retains her origins as the femme fatale: the Sovereignty Goddess in her death guise” (164). The discussion of Pre-Raphaelite artists, accompanied by helpful black-and-white images, adds further complexity to the chapter. These artists often chose working-class women and even prostitutes as models, subsequently trying to educate and rehabilitate them. This background gives us examples of male artists directly engaging with real women as they worked through their troubled responses to the characters and stories explored throughout the book.

Chapter eight takes us up to modern culture and notes that "Morgan la Fey has reappeared during the past two centuries at moments of cultural change in the definition of Woman, female sexuality, or motherhood—and their corresponding legal ramifications" (183). This chapter brings the book full circle to the ways in which contemporary anxieties shape modern depictions of Morgan, thus reinforcing how vital the topic remains. The discussion of T.H. White’s Once and Future King works particularly well within the book’s psychoanalytical framework. Pérez discusses White’s problems with his own mother, Constance White, whom he freely admitted was one of the inspirations for his characterizations of Morgause (188). I had been wondering why the book had not discussed Morgause’s role in the tradition earlier, but it makes sense to bring her in here with analysis of White. A mention that she would be discussed in more depth later would have been useful, but this chapter does a good job looking at her transformation in the literature from the Vulgate Cycle to Malory to White. The chapter then gives a tour of modern literature, film, theater, television, and comic books, concluding that “ambivalent feelings toward maternal and feminine power (especially over men) are as pertinent in cultural production today as a thousand years ago” (206).

When reading the first chapters of the book I was concerned that statements about "the subjectivity of all men" seem to universalize male anxieties and gender roles (55). But what becomes increasingly clear as the book progresses is not that specific roles or feelings remain unchanged, but rather that Morgan repeatedly functions as a touchstone for anxieties about women. The book takes on such a complex topic and deals with such a wide range of materials that it’s inevitable that individual readers will crave more in certain areas. And I would have loved signposting to let readers know when something mentioned in passing would return for further discussion later. Overall, though, Pérez brings together Celtic myth and comic book with ease, showing us the ways in which Morgan herself is a once and future queen. The wide scope of the book will make it appealing to scholars of the medieval and medievalist alike. The level of psychoanalytical theory might make it difficult at first for the enthusiast, but the richness of Pérez’s study would reward anyone interested in Arthurian literature, gender studies, or Morgan la Fey.

Kristi J. Castleberry

University of Rochester

Nagel: Medieval Modern

Never just modern: a review of Alexander Nagel. Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time. London: Thames and Hudson, 2012. 

Reviewed by Anne F. Harris (aharris@depauw.edu)

In Medieval Modern: Art Out of Time, Alexander Nagel unlocks the doors of the museum and the archive and dislodges works of art from an art history driven by periodization. Here, in the cross-temporal interpretive space the book creates, the 13th-century silver-gilded reliquary bust of Saint Yrieix looks across a page break to the diamond-studded skull of Damien Hirst’s 2007 For the Love of God (66-67). Here, in the findings of Nagel’s meticulous research, Robert Smithson’s earmarked and annotated pages from the December 1966 issue of Scientific American link the artist’s fascination with the form and entropy of ice crystals to his writings comparing the form and entropy of Minimalist sculpture to those of Mannerist art (146-47); and student notes from Joseph Albers’s 1946 design course proclaim a haptic Middle Ages in the memorable phrases, “Renaissance afraid of texture. Gothic much more care of matière” (161). Here, through the book’s sustained concern for how modern artists joined forces with medieval art to resist the certitude and boundary of the frame, Moholy Nagy writes about medieval stained glass and its “spatial-reflective radiation” as a solution to the element of movement in his construction of the Licht-Raum-Modulator from 1922-1930 (255-57). The possibilities of interpretation, research, and debate that Nagel presents engage works of art, artists and theorists, and materials in a series of encounters between medieval and modern visual cultures that energizes contemporary discussions of works of art and the work of art history.

Pursuing the possibilities of studying the “plural temporality” of art explored in Anachronic Renaissance, co-authored with Christopher S. Wood (Zone Books, 2010), Nagel’s book joins the endeavors of Bruce Holsinger’s The Premodern Condition: Medievalism and the Making of Theory (University of Chicago Press, 2005), and Amy Knight Powell’s Depositions: Scenes from the Late Medieval Church and the Modern Museum (Zone Books, 2012), in arguing for the transformative presence of the Middle Ages in modernity. This is not just a book about how modern artists are inspired by medieval art; it is a book about how modern artists use medieval art to critique institutional standards of modern art; more specifically, it is a book about how artists in the 1960s and 1920s dedicated to the “open” work of art as an interactive, provocative, and boundary-shifting experience for an involved audience used principles of open-ness and interaction in medieval art to critique, indeed tear down, the “closed” work of art exemplified by autonomous easel paintings and sculptures displayed in museums and galleries. Broadly speaking, as Nagel himself puts it, it “is a study of how art responds when the old ordered cosmos has fallen apart” (169).

From its opening pages, Nagel positions Medieval Modern as a book of artistic and art historical practice. The first three chapters are devoted to the principles and methodology that will guide the interpretations to follow. A series of claims makes clear that this approach strives towards a new understanding of artistic interaction between past and present, and a new way of practicing art history. The interest of the book is in how “encounters with medieval art mark the whole history of modernism” (8) rather than in tracing a history of influence or development; the focus is on “structural analogies” rather than iconography (10); it seeks to delineate “patterns and themes,” not just disparate episodes. Medieval art is joined to the endeavors of modern art not by formal elements, but rather by five practices that render the pre-modern a powerful resource for the critique of framed and stilled art performed by the 1960s and 1920s modern avant-gardes that Nagel selects for study: these are installation, indexicality, replication and the multiple, collage, and conceptual art. In advocating for “cross-temporal surfacings” (26) and an acknowledgment of a “decenteredness” (33) shared by medieval and modern cultures, the book opens up both the time/history and space/geography of medieval art to include modern art’s ambitions.

Chapters 4 through 8 perform a series of smaller-scale recursions that establish interests in evocative surfaces, interactive spaces, and engaged audiences in medieval and modern art. A series of “unlikely pairings” (40) guide these chapters and seek to dislodge modern art from an art history that has made it largely antithetical to the Middle Ages. Modern art, these chapters argue, participates in more medieval practices than has been previously acknowledged. Early 20th-century airplanes are likened to altarpieces through the processions and potential mysticism of both; pre-museum spaces of medieval and Renaissance chapels link with the dislocation of museum space effected by modern site-specific works; the medieval relic proves an apt framework within which to understand the avant-garde’s critique of value; and medieval wall painting’s involvement with the (physical) space and (spiritual) experience of its viewers proves resonant with Minimalism’s dematerialization of the worldly art object in favor of large, meditative surfaces. Nagel works nimbly through these suggestive correlations, acclimating the reader to a cross-temporal, recursive art history and its possibilities of interpretation. His succinct and pertinent evocations of Deleuze and Guattari, Foucault, and Derrida made me eager for him to engage with Bruno Latour’s critique of periodization and temporal demarcation in We Have Never Been Modern (trans. Catherine Porter, Harvard University Press, 1993). The absence of a response to Latour’s sociological critique signals Nagel’s prioritization of theorists of visual culture. In this, Medieval Modern becomes a book about the practice and debates of art and art historiography, and indeed matters of social history are displaced in favor of a history of ideas; Leo Steinberg entertains more discussion than Meyer Schapiro.

Chapters 9 through 11 focus on the problem of space and site through a correlation between medieval art recollecting the Holy Land and late 1960s Robert Smithson’s Non-Site works. These chapters form the first of three in-depth explorations of modern artists’ explorations of the Middle Ages. The second exploration shapes chapters 12 through 14, in which the arrangement and multi-perspective viewing of the Justinian and Theodora mosaics at San Vitale in Ravenna feature prominently in a rethinking of painting as installation, and as “a surface for operational processes” (186) spearheaded by Jasper Johns’s 1960s transformations of the surface of painting. The third, in chapters 18 through 20, traces the shifting enthusiasms of the 1920s Bauhaus for the process-oriented, utopic and transformative “cathedral thinking” (241) of the Gothic cathedral.

The breadth of the recursive loop between medieval and modern becomes apparent here. The displacement of stones from the Holy Land and their reconfiguration as relics in the Sancta Sanctorum of medieval Rome functions as the “topographical destabilization” (121) that Smithson advocates in his Non-Site works. This medieval practice “brings us full circle” (125) in Smithson’s own displacement of red clay from Hebron arranged to form the number 1969 in Hebrew letters on the soil of Mount Moriah for a 1969 Jewish Museum poster (the poster was ultimately rejected in favor of an image of Smithson’s Mirror Trail from Patterson Quarry in New Jersey, revealing the continuing controversy of Holy Land topography and its multiple displacements). In the chapter linking the mosaics of Ravenna and to Johns’s concern to shift painting to considerations of surface, Nagel proposes a brilliant rethinking of Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase “the medium is the message,” arguing that McLuhan is not only signifying that the means of communication are as important as the content, but rather that the means of communication matter because of the appropriation, re-investment, absorption, engagement, and adoption of old forms by new ones. This point will prove important in the final page of the book, when Nagel presents medievalism as “now encoded (usually unrecognized) in the DNA of contemporary art” (278), denoting a hidden life of forms (to paraphrase Henri Focillon). It also intersects provocatively with work by Graham Harman that has emerged since the publication of the book, notably “The Revenge of the Surface: Heidegger, McLuhan, Greenberg” (Paletten 291/292 (2013): 66-73) and “Greenberg, Duchamp, and the Next Avant-Garde” (Speculations V (2014): 271-54). The Bauhaus’s self-conscious appropriations of the processes and forms of collectivity (but only quasi-religious content) of Gothic cathedral building are traced in their shifts and changes from utopia to lived experience. The emblematic image discussed here, indeed the cover of the book itself, is Lyonel Feininger’s Cathedral of the Future, a print whose woodcut production hews to medieval practice, and whose use for the cover of the 1919 Bauhaus manifesto projects its critical importance. (On the print that Nagel identifies as the trial block for what would become this cover of the 1919 Bauhaus manifesto is a date which reads distinctly as “1922” – an explanation of this discrepancy would have been appreciated.) Feininger’s own decision to expand the image of the cathedral from a first print showing it as a framed image to a full-page cover signals the prominence of “cathedral thinking.”

At stake in these in-depth explorations of modern recursions to medieval practices is the heated contest between the elite autonomous work of art (rendered separate from the world by a frame or pedestal within the specific and prescriptive viewing space of the gallery or museum) and the pre-modern and avant-guard practices that presented art as contingent upon the viewer’s space and experience, and therefore more accessible, interactive, and transformative. The artists of these pages (with close analyses of Robert Smithson and Jasper Johns in the 1960s, and László Moholy-Nagy, Lyonel Feininger and Kurt Schwitters in the 1920s) and their theorists (Marshall McLuhan and Leo Steinberg in the 1960s, and Wilhelm Worringer and Adolf Behne in the 1920s) use the open-ness of medieval art (the decenteredness and displacement of works referencing the Holy Land; the multi-faceted surfaces of mosaics; and the process-oriented communal methods of cathedral construction) to shake the certitude and institutions that preserved the autonomous work of art. And yet Nagel argues throughout the book that the reign of the autonomous work of art was neither as assured nor prolonged as avant-garde artists believed: “It is difficult, now, to imagine that the museum picture could have loomed as such a mighty enemy in the eyes of the avant-gardes” (57). This remains a point of disagreement for me. On the one hand, I would very much like to believe that the pressures of pre-modern and avant-garde artistic practices squeezed the reign of elite, autonomous art to a negligible existence; on the other, I have a hard time denying the power of the institution of the museum and the economics of the market that autonomous art greatly benefitted from for well over two hundred years. (Nagel himself is vague about the reign of the autonomous work of art, at times setting its ascendancy in the 15th century, at others, in the 18th.) Seen from a cross-temporal perspective in which the pre-modern and the avant-garde forge a strong alliance, the autonomous work of art may not seem a mighty enemy; but seen within the historical specificity of its own institutions in the 1920s and 1960s, the autonomous work of art indeed seems formidable. The continuing politics of the museum and the place of the avant-garde today open up these chapters to welcome and vigorous discussion.

There are times within these chapters when the book’s title favors a reading in which “medieval” is but an adjective to “modern,” and the investigations of the book tip the balance between the two periods decidedly in favor of the modern. Medieval art is then presented almost exclusively for how it aids and abets avant-garde projects rather than with an eye to the debates that might have provoked artists, patrons and audiences in the Middle Ages. Describing Cage’s Fontana Mix, for example, as “Pollock rerouted, as it were, through Duchamp’s Three Standard Stoppages” (178) takes a certain degree of modern art expertise that may not be available to some readers. Strange, small mistakes skew the analysis, most notably placing the thirteenth-century Roman de la Rose in the fourteenth century and, from within an otherwise brilliant analysis of Umberto Eco’s 1962 Opera aperta, positioning Jean de Meun as writing within a stable (closed) system of allegorical signification. Nagel goes on to use Eugenio Battisti’s critique of Eco to re-establish a “more ‘open’ reading of medieval material” (172), but there is a missed opportunity here to discuss the radical semiotic open-ness of the “couilles/reliques” discussion in the Rose, in which Reason claims that meaning (and moral value) are ascribed and not at all inherent to language, and that she could say “balls” as easily as “relics” to signify the thing in the world known as “relics.”

It is to Nagel’s credit that disagreeing with aspects of his book itself prompts further interpretation, in this instance of the ways in which his discussion of relics and reliquaries (from Damien Hirst’s For the Love of God to the dynamic of the reproducible) might intersect with further medieval sources which, like Jean de Meun’s Rose, question closed systems of signification. Nagel’s book opens up a challenge for medievalists to more vigorously question medieval artists’ own recursions to antiquity, not simply as appropriations of the past but as concerted efforts within debates of the Middle Ages. Linda Seidel’s book Songs of Glory: The Romanesque Façades of Aquitaine (University of Chicago Press, 1981) and its analysis of the use of visual forms of Roman imperial antiquity in both Carolingian reliquaries and Romanesque architecture comes to mind. Another recursive loop worth revisiting is that of gender exclusion. Of the 139 illustrations in the book, only two are by women artists. Gender is in some ways too much of a social history issue for the emphases of this book (a point of debate in itself), but the virtual absence of women should at least prompt further thinking about the hyper-masculinity of the history of the Middle Ages and the avant-garde presented here. Doing so would perpetuate one of the values of the book: to open works of art closed by institutions.

Nowhere does Nagel’s cross-temporal virtuosity shine as brightly as in his chapter on Jean-Antoine Watteau’s L’Enseigne de Gersaint. It is surprising that in a book devoted to the medievalism of modernism a painting from 1720 should have such a pivotal role, and yet the claims of chapter 15 (and those that follow in the next two chapters) are crucial to Nagel’s meta-argument about the open work of art. Painted at the height of the Académie Royale de Peinture et de Sculpture (for which Watteau had painted his Embarkation for Cythera as his reception piece in 1717), and during the first flourishes of the gallery system and art market, L’Enseigne de Gersaint is nonetheless presented here as a critique, “a commentary on a new system of art, offered from a position just outside the system” (201). Nagel’s agility is such that by the end of the chapter, the reader can understand L’Enseigne de Gersaint both within a very (very) long medieval tradition and a (very) nascent avant-garde critique. The painting’s placement (even if only for fifteen days) outside Gersaint’s painting gallery, its concerns with visuality in and out of the painted frame, and acknowledgement of the painting as surface (in “two-dimensional contingencies” (203) such as its elision of the female clients of the gallery and the women painted in the works of art they wish to buy) make it a meeting point of medieval art’s interactivity with a curious public and the avant-garde’s critique of the static image. L’Enseigne de Gersaint becomes a temporally hybrid image: not chronologically medieval (yet as a street sign participating in medieval visual culture of the public sphere), not chronologically avant-garde (yet as literally on the margins of the gallery, critical of the institutions of autonomous art). The re-appearance of figures from L’Enseigne de Gersaint within a photomontage of Watteau’s clients in cathedral space within chapter 19 (251) then becomes a tour-de-force of recursion. The next two chapters continue troubling limits Watteau had begun to push: of visibility with the diaphane and Duchamp and The Bride Stripped Bare by her Bachelors from 1915-23 in chapter 16, and of originality with the idea of the reproducible, relics and acheiropoieta (art not made by human hands) linked to Duchamp’s readymades in chapter 17.

Nagel’s conclusion articulating the effects of a powerful dynamic of entropy which pulls consistently towards the Middle Ages is worth quoting in full for the power and presence that it credits to medieval art, and the momentum of medievalism in modernity’s confrontation of its objects of critique: “Medieval art flared into view amidst the breakdown of belief in the system of fine arts, in the museum object, in mimetic naturalism, in the idea of artistic originality and the unique work of art, in Enlightenment aesthetics, in linear history and rationalist models of time, and in a modern, colonialist concept of Europe” (275). In a cross-temporal art history prizing the presence of medieval artistic practices in the subversive tactics of modern art, medieval art is always already avant-garde. This is both the argument and the invitation of this provocative book.

Anne F. Harris
DePauw University

Montoya: Medievalist Enlightenment

Alicia C. Montoya. Medievalist Enlightenment: From Charles Perrault to Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2013. 256pp.

Review by: Kathryn E. Fredericks (frederic@geneseo.edu)

The subject of Medievalist Enlightenment: From Charles Perrault to Jean-Jacques Rousseau by Alicia C. Montoya is medieval literature, and this book is the second volume in the series Medievalism.  Volume I of the series is entitled Anglo-Saxon Culture and the Modern Imagination, edited by David Clarke and Nicholas Perkins.

In Medievalist Enlightenment: From Charles Perrault to Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Alicia C. Montoya provides an in-depth study of the period 1680-1750.  She explains that in this time frame "portions of the secular, vernacular literature of the Middle Ages – the romances, troubadour lyric and other narrative works we consider today as the age's literary classics – came to the fore: the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, or the period spanning late classicism through early Enlightenment" (2).  Reiterating the fact that the presence of medieval literature in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries has already been documented, Montoya states that "the decades from the 1680s through to the 1750s have almost invariably been overlooked or addressed only in passing" (2).  She presents here, therefore, "the first book-length study addressing the literary medievalism of the decades from the 1680s to the 1750s" (2), and in this book, she sets out her intention specifically to "make the argument that modernity arose in part out of literary medievalism" (4).  In the abstract to her book, Montoya says that this 'literary medievalism' "played a vital role in the construction of the French Enlightenment; Starting with the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, it influenced movements leading to the Romantic rediscovery of the Middle Ages, and helped to shape new literary genres, from the epistolary novel to the fairy tale and opera."  Concerning the overall purpose of the book, Montoya writes: "From the re-evaluation of the medieval thus emerged not only the seeds of a new poetics, but also the central questions that preoccupied Enlightenment thinkers from Montesquieu to Rousseau", and "[a]t the centre of these debates was the notion of historical progress."  Montoya shows in this work that a careful examination of how this particular period of history considered the Middle Ages provides us with a better understanding of conceptions of modernity.


Medievalist Enlightenment is divided into three main parts, and is comprised of an Introduction, six chapters, and a Conclusion.  The first two chapters are found in 'Part I: Conceptualizing the Medieval', which discusses "late seventeenth-century conceptualizations of the medieval" (8) to "the reflections on the medieval of the philosophes and their critics of the 1750s" (8).  Montoya examines the following three authors in great detail: Charles Perrault, Jean Chapelain, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.


In 'Chapter 1: A Sense of the Past: Ancients, Moderns, and the Medieval', Montoya presents a discussion of Perrault's Parallèle des Anciens et des Modernes.  She chooses Perrault's Parallèle "because this was the most complete and systematic text to appear during the initial phase of the Quarrel addressing the issues it raised (25).  Chronologically speaking, the "issues," she later explains, are two opposing ideas: "If, on the one hand, the medieval was moving closer to the present day, on the other hand modernity was encroaching on the medieval, for there was not always a sense, in Perrault's Parallèle, of a strict separation between the two" (32).  Montoya provides a particular example in Perrault's work: "The last volume of the Parallèle, which argued for the technical superiority of the Moderns over classical Antiquity, was perhaps the most surprising, for time and again Perrault resorted, for his examples, to the medieval period" (32-33).  Ideas regarding considerations of the relationship between the past and the present, and the question of where to place the Middle Ages in history, or how to label it as its own historical classification, are of central importance in this opening chapter.  

'Chapter 2: The Medievalist Rhetorics of Enlightenment' explores considerations of medieval literature specifically by Jean Chapelain and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  Chapelain's dialogue La lecture des vieux romans and Rousseau's Discours sur les sciences et les arts are directly compared.  Montoya points out that "at first sight, the two texts may appear to convey diametrically opposed viewpoints.  While Rousseau ostensibly condemned the medieval, Chapelain's dialogue on the contrary argued for a rehabilitation of medieval romans, on moral rather than stylistic grounds" (47-48).  Montoya dedicates this chapter to showing how the two texts, though different in methodology, can both be viewed as favorable considerations of medieval literature.  Montoya concludes that "Chapelain and Rousseau drew on humanist precedents in order to propose a vision in which modernity could be perceived not as the result of a process of historical progress, but, rather, as moral and political degeneration" (68).  Montoya writes that the "[a]ges previously viewed as dark" (68) – as well as "barbaric" (68) – "were now viewed in terms of moral exemplarity" (68) during the time of the philosophes, the Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, or, the Age of Light.     


Chapters three, four, and five are found in 'Part II: Reimagining the Medieval'.  This part treats "concrete examples of literary medievalism" (8).  In 'Chapter 3: Survivals: Reading the Medieval Roman at the Dawn of the Enlightenment', Montoya opens by explaining that here she "will explore how, during the early period covering the 1680s to the 1700s, the roman or chivalric romance (roman de chevalerie) was read by contemporary readers, and how these readings related to other conceptions of the medieval" (71).  She takes as her prime example the letters of Marie de Rabutin-Chantal, marquise de Sévigné and "relates Sévigné's remarks on medieval romans to other traces of early Enlightenment readers and readings of medieval texts, and beyond these, to the critical debate on the significance of the medieval past for literary modernity" (72).  In this chapter, Montoya primarily discusses the existence of romans de chevalerie in eighteenth-century libraries, which ones were being read and by whom.  Montoya points out a "more interesting question" (83) as to "how [these texts] were actually read by contemporary readers" (83).  Here she mentions specifically "correspondences, journals, and other autobiographical works" (83), and takes the letters of Madame de Sévigné as a powerful example of "opening literature to new social groups" (95) – to a female audience and to different classes of society, for example.

In 'Chapter 4: Continuities: The Medieval as Performance', Montoya shows how two genres, the opera and the fairy tale, "invite us to think of the medieval not so much as text, but as performance: not primarily as content, but as a kind of musical mode" (12).  This argument is particularly strong with reference to the opera, where Montoya provides several detailed examples within the context of theatricality and performativity (117).  While the "performing authorship" (128) discussion of the fairy tales is indeed an interesting and novel approach, other considerations of the later influence of fairy tales could also be explored further, such as the evolution and development of the conte to the conte philosophique genre so characteristic of the Enlightenment and of the literature of the eighteenth century, including different European authors, and especially Voltaire.    

In the final section of Part II, 'Chapter 5: Reconfigurations: Medievalism and Desire, Between Eros and Agape' Montoya focuses primarily on the letters of Madame de Sévigné and the fiction of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.  Here, she "[explores] Sévigné's and Rousseau's rewriting of the Abélard and Héloïse myth" (12).  The purpose of this is to show "that these authors deployed medieval references in an attempt to secularize older notions of Christian agape, seeking to attain a new, distinctly modern reconciliation between secular and divine varieties of love" (12).  Specific topics discussed include "Earthly and Divine Love" (147), "The Role of the Heroide" (150), "Desire as an Instrument of Religious Realization" (154), " Sévigné: The Mother as Lover" (157), "Motherhood and Agape" (160), "Rousseau's Nouvelle Héloïse and the Héloïsian-Ovidian Model" (165), and "New Ideals of Marriage" (173).


The third and final part of Montoya's text is entitled 'Studying the Medieval' and includes the sixth chapter and the Conclusion.  Part III "argues that the professionalization of medieval studies coincided with broader philosophical shifts marking the beginning of modernity – and defining, too, the conceptual parameters within which we continue to speak of the medieval today" (8).  In 'Chapter 6: The Invention of Medieval Studies', Montoya "focuses on the ideological contest between academic medievalists, and aristocratic scholar-amateurs" (12).  Montoya begins her final chapter by stating that the "new, academic medievalism had its institutional basis at the Académie royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres" (185), from which emerged "an ideological struggle between two competing models of medievalism" (186), as Montoya suggests, "an older, aristocratic model of amateur engagement with the medieval, and a newer, bourgeois model of professional historiography" (186).  The chapter focuses on the varying considerations of medieval scholarship by three authors: Jean-Baptiste La Curne de Sainte-Palaye, Anne-Claude-Philippe, comte de Caylus, and perhaps most importantly, as Montoya notes, Charles-Louis de Secondat, baron de Montesquieu, in whose works "in the actual practice and development of medieval studies, the two competing traditions came together" (219).

Montoya ends Medievalist Enlightenment with a section called 'Medievalism as an Alternative Modernity' (221), where she concludes that "[u]nderstanding [literary medievalism from the 1680s to the 1750s] is crucial not only to understanding the parameters within which we have ourselves come to conceive of the medieval, but also to understanding the epistemological debates on which [Enlightenment's] modernity itself was built" (224).  This work presents an organized, thoughtful, and detailed analysis of the presence and considerations of medieval literature in the early Enlightenment period.  The selections discussed here highlight pertinent entries from this volume, which is an excellent contribution to scholarship on both medieval and Enlightenment studies, and a valuable resource for scholars of each period.   


Kathryn E. Fredericks
State University of New York at Geneseo