Krzywinska, MacCallum-Stewart, and Parsler, eds: Ringbearers: The Lord of the Rings Online as Intertextual Narrative

Tanya Krzywinska, Esther MacCallum-Stewart, and Justin Parsler, eds. Ring Bearers: The Lord of the Rings Online as Intertextual Narrative. Manchester & New York: Manchester University Press, 2011.

Reviewed by: Carol L. Robinson (clrobins@kent.edu)

On April 24, 2007, Turbine, Inc.[1] launched its originally subscription-based (but now free to play) Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG), The Lord of the Rings Online (LOTRO), to North America, Australia, Japan and Europe. It continues to remain an actively played game, with plans for the latest (fifth) game expansion packet, “Helm's Deep” set to be released in Fall 2013. Thus it is exciting to find a book devoted to this tasteful alternative to the more comic (but not necessarily comical) medievalist and neo-Tolkienist MMORPGs available, such as World of Warcraft. According to its “Introduction,” the goal of the collection of essays in RingBearers: The Lord of the Rings Online as Intertextual Narrative, is to address “LOTRO across all its communicative dimensions, albeit from different perspectives,” while also focusing upon “the nature of LOTRO's transmediation in one way or another” (3). This focus appears to be dominated by a theoretical approach emphasizing popular culture and/or narratology, including Transmedial World Theory, and under this focus, much of the book undertakes a comparison/contrast with the more popular, perhaps better known neo-Tolkienist game, World of Warcraft (WoW). The book contains seven essays, and each one seems to be stronger (deeper and more efficiently written) than the one before it.

For example, in some aspects, Douglas Brown and Tanya Krzywinska's “Following in the footsteps of fellowship: A Tale of There and Back Again — Text/Translation/Tolkienisation” serves as a nice review of the game, and part of its evaluative conclusion states that “this is a very well-crafted game, with craft thoroughly inscribed into the care taken with music, game mechanics, animation, voice work and art work. In this regard the game provides an interesting case study for adaptation and transmedial studies as well as students of design and contemporary digital aesthetics” (43). But more than a simple review of the game, the essay is a solid textual description and analysis of what it is like playing the game, with organized particulars: landscape, mapping, language, characterization, citizenship and community, fellowship, combat, beauty, and the marketing of it all into a neat little videogame package. Using textual analysis, they attempt to “critically navigate this gamescape” (42), discovering (at the very least) that Turbine's trick for direct involvement with a well-established and limiting story world (Tolkien's Middle-earth tales) is the unique use of the epic chain. What seems to make LOTRO unique, according to Brown and Krzywinska, is the use of an epic chain of quests that directly ties the books and films to the game:

The epic books follow on from one another in a loose continuum punctuated by the major storyline events. By the end of the first volume of epic quests, players will have: aided the rangers' stronghold of Esteldin; hunted down a Nazgûl that survived the flooding of the Bruinen; dodged fear-inducing watchers in Angmar similar to those outside of Minas Morgul; conversed with all the members of the original Fellowship; honed their battle skills; and, in undertaking such quests, will probably have found fellowship with other players. (31)

The chapter points out many overlaps and divergences between J. R. R. Tolkien's books, Peter Jackson's movies, and Turbine's game. For example, they point out that in LOTRO, “it is not a map that the new player first encounters; instead, it is a character creation screen” (15). Maps, they further argue, not only serve to tease the gamer with a never-ending scope of landscape, but “also play an important role in terms of authorship in the franchise” (17). Most RPGs, particularly online, are very concerned with environment, particularly landscaping. One of the central objectives of any MORPG is questing, which requires landscaping, and thus the landscaping in LOTRO is not just an echo of Tolkien’s original devotion to creating a detailed landscape. They acknowledge this fact that the chicken (the game's landscape) doesn't necessarily come before the egg (the mapping): “The inclusion of distinctive landscapes that hark back to the actual past reminds us that digital game form is symbiotically tied to the creation and design of space. This is evident in the fact that often games begin in their development as maps and that games regularly make use of environmental features to tell stories” (26). In their initial review of the game's structure, Brown and Krzywinska set both the tone for the entire book as well as the scene for the next chapter: blending personal experiences with professional analyses (sometimes successfully, sometimes not) and focusing upon transmedia concepts more specifically.

Transmedial World Theory, apparently formalized by Lisbeth Lkastrup and Susan Tosca, seems to be very similar to Russian Formalism, except that the “story world” is further contained in a structure that they refer to as “the transmedia world.” Indeed, the study seems to be a popular culture analysis application of their Transmedial World Theory, but they also admittedly make use of Reader Response Theory (Umberto Eco) and Reception Theory (Wolfgang Iser). Their Transmedial World Theory shows a great deal of promise: the implied conclusion that the transmedia story world is complicated by layers and layers of factors, including “a brief analysis of how LOTRO relates to the mythos, topos and logos of the Middle-earth transmedia world universe” (53). The quoting of various players is, at the very least, interesting, if not also useful, in that it provides an anecdotal light into the darkness of who and what populates this gaming experience. Their Transmedial World Theory shows a great deal of promise, recognizing the complexities of the relationships between forms and contents of various plots of a story world, and such recognition allows for a deeper appreciation for how players and their character avatars function — I look forward to seeing its application in future studies.

The next four essays together provide numerous fantastic observations about role-playing (and its particular limitations and liberations in an MMORPG), character narrative identity, community (both within and without the game), visual aesthetics, narrative structure (on-going narratives caused by player interactions vs. scripts), gamer identity as it relates to character development, demonic traditions embraced by the game (particularly LOTRO in Monster Play mode), binary dialectic structures of the narrative, superficiality vs. realism, character props and craftsmanship, the labor of the characters and the massive labor of the players behind them. The authors of these four chapters make numerous fascinatingly constructive points that allow the reader to better see how the game functions, thrives, and takes on life in the cyberworld.

Each of these chapters speaks to themes established in the first two chapters, both in terms of textual analysis, ludic traditions of role playing, and the expanse of Tolkien's transmedial world mythos. Esther MacCallum-Stewart puts forth a brilliant analysis of how a player might respond to the limited variables of role-playing character development in LOTRO, including a comparison/contrast with table-top games and live action role playing (LARPs). One of the stronger guiding points she makes early on (and follows) is that “it is extremely important to note that players have different expectations of what role play actually means” and that “MMORPG role play does not have clear definitions” of role play, “nor is it entirely understood as a cohesive behavior by those wishing to take part” (76). Gordon Calleja makes a comprehensive analysis of the epic chains that build the narrative structure of LOTRO in terms how this game has succeeded in narrative structuring (better than most MMORPGs) and yet has also suffered for that success (limited by Tolkien's mythos). Frans Mäyrä successfully demonstrates why “it is useful to study game play from a perspective informed by the analysis of demonic and liminal phenomena” while also acknowledging the importance of recognizing “that approaching games from a cultural anthropological (liminal or liminoid) perspective does not mean to claim that games are totally separated into some symbolic or ritual reality of their own” (114). Finally, Justin Parsler examines props use and crafting systems in LOTRO and how these are similar to use in other MMORPGs, including a hint at how character labor is franchised into player labor, applying the Three-Sector Hypothesis economic theory developed by Alan Fisher, Colin Clark and Jean Fourastié. He argues that LOTRO goes beyond the Journeyman/Master structure of most MMORPGs, seeking “to exploit [with limited success] the idea of the guild as a mutual support group and as a source of secret knowledge” (152). Like the first two essays, these four essays also serve as reviews of the strengths and weaknesses of LOTRO.

The final essay of the book also appears to serve as a conclusion to the other essays, tying the book together nicely. “Unrealistic expectations,” by Richard A. Bartle is a fabulously witty comparison/contrast between MMORPGs of today — particularly LOTRO — and multi-user dungeons (MUDs) of decades gone by. He argues “that a player of an early MUD who time-travelled to the present day would nevertheless regard LOTRO's ‘realisticness’ as a joke” (155). In so doing, he provides an analysis of how “realism” has changed over time (just as cultural senses of beauty have changed over time), as well as how cultural values of the relationship between fiction and reality have also changed over time. Having somewhat explored this issue, he then suddenly shifts to an analysis of why a player would “not want” her “virtual world to be realistic” (161). In his conclusion, he observes that a game's “realistic” aspect refers to “consistency with their fiction” as well as with “their non-fiction” (171).

As the “Introduction” is careful to emphasize, “the authors of the essays collected here have all published work on videogames,” and it is true that many of them “are pioneers of the academic study of videogames, particularly online games” (1). It is equally clear, however, that at least several (if not all) of these scholars played Lord of the Rings Online[2] together, in a kinship. Indeed, it is clear, in each of the essays, that they are each enthusiastic about the game, that they are eager to share how much they enjoyed the game — perhaps even at the expense of deeper analysis, which Douglas Brown and Tanya Krzywinska admit as a possibility: “Our formal analysis is certainly coloured by our experience of playing the game, which has been largely very pleasurable” (42). Throughout the book, there also appear to be a lot of generalizations made about the gaming population, probably made from personal experiences but undocumented nonetheless, and thus may cast doubts upon the conclusions reached by the authors. In particular, Lisbeth Klastrup and Susana Tosca's essay (“When fans become players: The Lord of the Rings Online in a transmedial world perspective”) seems marred by their dependence upon unreliable data. Lkastrup and Tosca posted a survey “in July 2009 on the official forums for the European LOTRO community” (49). In the two weeks that the survey was run, 315 people responded, with 214 responses being actually completed; however, at the time of this survey, “a Turbine designer stated that the game had around 250,000 users” (50). For a sample of this size, more statistical information is needed, particularly regarding confidence levels. Beyond acknowledging the European location of the players, it is likely they did not take into account the type of players responding to this survey: not all 250,000 players of the world join these official European forums; the scope was not world-wide, only limited to parts of Europe, and only limited to people who tend to respond to surveys. Indeed, of that number, according to Lkastrup and Tosca, 46% of those surveyed were German. The sample is probably biased; it is unlikely representative of the entire LOTRO gaming population, which makes the analysis invalid. They conclude that, beyond the Frodo franchise agenda,

LOTRO players experience intertextual play not as a targeted brand experience that makes them desire and consume other products, but as direct references to their own repertoire of knowledge and understanding of the transmedial world, Middle-earth. They have already appropriated all the texts; what this MMOG gives them is the opportunity to dwell in their own memories and expand their horizon of expectations and significance by an act of performance that gives even more value to what they treasure. (65)

This is a fantastic observation, but because of the limitations of their survey and data, this conclusion is only valid for those who responded to the survey and may not apply to all LOTRO players. They almost acknowledge this issue: “We might speculate, though we cannot demonstrate it with our current empirical data, that what makes MMOGs unique as games is also the possibility to carry out the interpretative activity, which relates the gameworld story (layer two) to the transmedial world mythos (layer three) as a collective or shared endeavor” (62-63). If they had scrapped the survey, they could have demonstrated most of their excellent points by more closely examining the narrative structures of the LOTRO game world. While anecdotal evidence has its place, and may add to the pleasure of the scholarship, it should never become the scholarship.

For example (and here is my anecdotal piece), I have played this game, as well as its predecessor, Turbine Inc.'s Dungeons & Dragons Online (DDO).[3] Much to my surprise (and now comes my scholarly observations), none of the book's contributors even mention this first game. Indeed, except for what is mentioned in Bartle's essay, there seems to be a lack of appreciation for gaming history, causing a weakness in the arguments made. There is a long love affair between geeks and Tolkien's world that has fueled the development of all Tolkienist games (beyond the table and land, into the computer). In addition to William Crowther's famous game adaptation (Colossal Cave, or Colossal Cave Adventure, which Bartle mentions in his essay), there is also the documented direct ties between Tolkien's mythological world and the geek world: according to Rick Adams, the computer labs at SAIL “were given to whimsical names that fit into a Lord of the Rings theme,” and printers were programmed with an optional “Elvish font” system.[4] I am sure that these esteemed scholars are very aware of this history (particularly Turbine’s development of LOTRO elements in the previously created DDO), and I am baffled by their ignoring it in this particular collective analysis of LOTRO. My complaints might be a little unfair in that I am asking a mostly textual and popular culture response to be also historically grounded; however, the authors of the essays bring historical context into each of their analyses in other ways, and they make numerous comparisons and contrasts with other neo-Tolkienist games, particularly WoW.

Aside from these issues, I found the book's collection to be most inspiring and delightfully amusing. During the entire time that I read through the lovely essays of this book, Felicia Day's song, “Do You Wanna Date My Avatar?” — a song she wrote for her hit online series The Guild,[5] which has been running since 2007 — ran through my mind:

Hang with me in my MMO
So many places we can go
You'll never see my actual face
Our love, our love will be in virtual space[6]

It is not at all because there was any sort of hanky-panky happening, or even implied as happening, between the scholars. Rather, I think the song started going through my head at the first mention that the book was conceived as a player-involvement first, a scholarly text second. In other words, the only applicable part of the above mentioned song is the above quoted first set of lyrics, and in this case, “our love” refers to the purely platonic love affair that each scholar apparently had as a player with both the game and fellow gamers. The collection of essays in this book come dangerously close to crossing the fuzzy line between sharing a delightfully contagious enthusiasm for the game and providing logical, factually supported argumentative analyses of the game. But they manage not to cross it, and perhaps because of this pre-scholarly playing, not only further establishes the scholars' authority as experienced players, but causes the book to hold together fantastically well, and I must confess that I wish that I could have more directly joined in on their fun. The apparent fellowship of these player-scholars brings a very special intuitively developed unity to their consciously collected collaborative scholarship, and at the end of the last essay of the book, even I felt a little sorry that both the gaming and scholarly adventures had to come to an end. It is unfortunate: the book seems to be too short — “It is challenging in a paper of this length to both outline a sound framework and conduct a full analysis of LOTRO's narrative,” complained Gordon Calleja (108). Yet as it is, the book is enjoyably interesting, delightfully stimulating. Like a gamer who has come to the end of a game, the reader of this volume wants more: more in-depth development of some of the brilliant points and the fascinating ideas each essay makes. This collection of essays is certainly groundbreaking, no doubt about it, but I look forward to seeing the “expansion package” of this book.

Hang with me in my MMO
So many places we can go...[7]

Carol L. Robinson
Kent State University Trumbull

[1] Turbine, Inc. http://www.turbine.com/en/
[2] Lord of the Rings Online http://www.lotro.com/en
[3] Dungeons & Dragons Online (Turbine, Inc.) http://www.ddo.com/en
[4] Rick Adams has since removed his observation about the rooms and the printer from his web page, "The Crowther and Woods 'Colossal Cave Adventure' Game; Here's Where It All Began..." (Rick Adams' Little Cornero of Cyberspace: The Colossal Cave Adventure Page, http://rickadams.org/adventure/a_history.html), but in an email he confirmed to me, “It wasn't incorrect” (Rick Adams. “Email: 7/16/08”).
[5] The Guild. Written and Directed by Felicia Day. Perf. Felicia Day, Sandeep Parikh, Jeffrey Lewis, Fince Caso, Amy Okuda, and Robin Thorsen. (2007-2011) http://www.watchtheguild.com/.
[6] "Do You Wanna to Date My Avatar?" (The Guild, 2009) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=urNyg1ftMIU.
[7] Ibid.

Cawsey: Twentieth-Century Chaucer Criticism

Kathy Cawsey. Twentieth-Century Chaucer Criticism: Reading Audiences. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2011. 

Reviewed by: Valerie B. Johnson (valerie.johnson@lmc.gatech.edu) 

Kathy Cawsey's 2011 monograph, Twentieth-Century Chaucer Criticism: Reading Audiences, is an excellent reference for graduate students struggling to synthesize a century of scholarship on Chaucer and his (many) audiences; indeed, Cawsey makes this explicit in her “Preface.” As she observes, though there are many excellent guides to Chaucerian scholarship, “most of these books are historical summaries, and do not provide explanations for why completely contradictory ways of reading Chaucer arose over the course of the twentieth century” (ix). Appropriately, then, Cawsey herself has considered her own audiences at length, and identifies plural categories of ideal readers: within the field of medieval studies, she sees the book as useful for advanced undergraduates and early graduate students, and perhaps mature scholars as well; outside of medieval circles, she sees her work as participating in a larger conversation of authorship studies and the history of literary criticism, and thus providing non-medievalists a perspective on how, and why, general trends in literary study are adapted to work with medieval texts. Cawsey is not seeking to make an argument about Chaucer, his audiences, or his texts, and she does not engage with medieval material directly – readers will instead find an overview of the role of the “audience function” within Chaucerian scholarship and an examination of how the assumptions underlying individual critics' understanding of audiences directly impacted the theoretical frameworks which those critics have developed. Instead of an argument for a particular theoretical approach to audience or response theory, Twentieth-Century Chaucer Criticism is a sustained demonstration that further research into Chaucerian audiences, medieval and modern, is urgently necessary; moreover, this research must be intimately aware of its own histories and accompanying biases. 

Cawsey's work, which in structure and approach clearly started as a dissertation, demonstrates how frequently assumptions and biases drive our meticulous and careful studies of audience and reception. Whether the audiences under study are medieval or modern, the breadth of her survey leaves no room to disagree with this point. Within the context of Chaucer studies, Cawsey structures her book to reflect the six major modern critics she deems most influential as well as representative of their particular critical modes. The result is a book that seeks to further develop the importance of the “audience function” by focusing on how individual scholars engaged this singular author; Cawsey includes brief biographies that contextualize each scholar's critical influences. Each chapter also attempts to summarize the critic's approach to reading in a single adjective: thus, the first chapter focuses on George Lyman Kittredge, the “dramatic reader”; C. S. Lewis the “psychological reader”; E. Talbot Donaldson “the careful reader”; D. W. Robertson the “allegorical reader”; Carolyn Dinshaw the “gendered reader”; and Lee Patterson the “subjective reader.” Twentieth-Century Chaucer Criticism is a history of literary criticism, but it is a history that is aware of its own inward-facing nature. The book will perhaps have value in years to come as an artifact that is representative of how early twenty-first century scholars are explicitly questioning their own biases and examining their own critical pasts. 

For scholars now, however, Twentieth-Century Chaucer Criticism serves best as a finding aid that presents a detailed, though not exhaustive, review and selected bibliography of critical trends, filtered through the work of individual critics. Cawsey envisions her work as useful to graduate students, and this is certainly correct. Graduate students preparing for comprehensive exams will undoubtedly find this book extremely useful, and Cawsey's impartial presentation will enable these students to determine whether or not a particular trend or mode of thought requires further research. Each chapter identifies keystone publications for each trend, sometimes tracing the origins of an individual critic's particular stance. Consequently, I believe the book will allow students of medieval English literature and history a necessary measure of impartial distance that can be difficult to achieve under the stressful and fast-paced context of exam reading. Moreover, Cawsey's linear presentation of the critical history of Chaucerian audiences demonstrates the radical turns the field has taken in the last three decades, turns that, in my view, we should not attempt to reverse: gendered reading practices, female readers reading within male contexts, racial awareness, acknowledgment of the impact of class upon interpretation of a text, cultural sophistication, post-colonial awareness . . . the list goes on, and should be guarded to prevent backsliding. For the mature scholars that Cawsey sees as her second category of readers, Twentieth-Century Chaucer Criticism can be useful secondary reading for teaching graduate seminars and in articulating interpretive possibilities to advanced undergraduates. In terms of scholarship, the book functions well as a quick reference text or a synthesis which can be used to build the foundations of Chaucerian reception theory. Cawsey's third category of readers, non-medievalist historians of literary criticism or literary specialists working primarily in non-medieval periods, may find the final two chapters on Dinshaw and Patterson most useful since Dinshaw and Patterson engage most directly with contemporary literary theories. 

A fourth category of reader, one Cawsey does not explicitly anticipate, could be readers interested in medievalism. Medievalism is both the use of medieval material in modern works and the study of this process, and in my view both the artistic and scholarly sides of the equation could derive mutual benefit from Twentieth-Century Chaucer Criticism. I suggest that the creators of artistic works – which I consider to include traditionally “artistic” media like painting, stained glass. and sculpture, as well as modern films, video games, role-players, web designers, app programmers, novelists, and generally anyone, professional or enthusiast, who creates imaginative works using medieval themes, materials, images, etc. – could use Cawsey's book to understand or explain the multiplicity of the Middle Ages and medieval source material. Artists and authors are frequently asked to articulate the sources of their inspiration and to define how, and why, their own works deviate from those sources; successful creators often cite scholarly works with crossover appeal as key parts of their artistic process, particularly when crafting the intricate layers of detail which modern audiences demand. 

As an example, I offer two major traditions with roots in the medieval period that have benefited, in the past, from dialog between artists and scholars: Robin Hood and King Arthur. Both traditions have reflected contemporary tastes in cinema and a desire for realism that feels emotionally correct while also challenging stereotypes, moves which have pushed the traditions forward and made them viable commercially and culturally. In the 1980s, television creators like Richard Carpenter (Robin of Sherwood) and novelists like Robin McKinley (The Outlaws of Sherwood) explicitly identified J. C. Holt's monograph Robin Hood (1982), a dense scholarly history, as exceptionally influential in their research on Robin Hood narratives and the Middle Ages more generally. Antoine Fuqua's 2004 film King Arthur bills itself as the “True Story Behind the Legend,” and while the historical accuracy of much of the material is problematic, Fuqua successfully achieved his desire to avoid a blandly generic faux-medieval “fantasy” setting. The impact of these works is significant: Carpenter's Robin of Sherwood introduced the concept of the racial Other as an integral addition to the traditional outlaw band, a trope which has reappeared in every major filmed version of the tradition (barring only the 2011 Russell Crowe vehicle), and the Fuqua film provided a strong commentary on the obligations and responsibilities of long-term occupying forces when interacting with native populations, a trope which paralleled American military actions at the time of release and in the decade following. 

Creators who claim their works are based purely on the Middle Ages are often (correctly) criticized by medievalists and modern cultural studies scholars alike, because – like many of the early critics which Cawsey surveys – these creators are assuming what Cawsey calls a universal audience. Modern authors and audiences are increasingly sensitive to these universalizing assumptions. Moreover, such universal claims often appear, to audiences, to be superficial attempts to justify misogyny and racism, or to dismiss it as “historically inaccurate” and thus permissible. Both perspectives do active harm to the modern audiences consuming those artistic works. Thus, works which examine and lay out the history of a field in direct and impartial language, like Cawsey's Twentieth-Century Chaucer Criticism, can be useful to the creator of a work drawing on themes common to medievalism to understand how better to meet, frustrate, or misdirect audience reactions. Cawsey's impartial presentation may help these interested yet non-specialist readers come to their own conclusions. 

Moreover, works like Cawsey's can help creators understand scholarly objections: since many creators are enthusiastic students of the medieval period, creators and scholars can open dialog on the basis of past methods of criticism. Thus, scholars (and teachers) who have often found themselves exclaiming or thinking that “it's all just wrong!” when teaching or studying these works may find Cawsey's history useful in identifying textually-based interpretive reactions, whether taken linguistically (Kittredge), ironically (Robertson), or allegorically (Donaldson). Moreover, Cawsey's work is a careful valuation and assessment of several scholars whose work is out of copyright and thus available through services like GoogleBooks or Project Guttenberg: though modern scholars may not use Kittredge's approach, my own conversations with enthusiasts and fans of particular series (or genres) demonstrates that commonly accepted academic theories, such as the “death of the author” and the resulting shift toward reader-response based methods of interpretation, are not as widely-distributed as I could wish. The increasing direct interactions of creators and fans via media platforms including Twitter, Tumblr, and blog comments has created, for some, a return to the insistence that the author knows best: most fans find it difficult to sustain their legitimate interpretations of a text when a creator has explicitly stated that an alternate interpretation was intended. C. S. Lewis, Cawsey's “psychological reader,” is a particularly good example of this situation, adding additional weight in the form of his intellectual authority as a scholar and Oxford don. Lewis' scholarly efforts, like those of his contemporary J. R. R. Tolkien, are read by fans of his fictional works as well as by academics, and his seminal monograph, Allegory of Love, is often received uncritically by readers whose exposure to his work is primarily through his created world of Narnia. These readers can be uncritical because their enjoyment of Lewis' artistic work adds value to his authority as a professor, accepting his proclamations without question. Moreover, his artistic success as a novelist who carefully crafted a world that appeals, still, to many modern audiences may also add weight to his assessment of medieval audiences. Cawsey's careful summation and assessment of Lewis could benefit these readers, and help scholars understand why readers of popular culture so often believe that medieval cultures were homologous and universal. In turn, this can help teachers improve student understanding of the complexities of medieval culture and texts without resorting to techniques – including indirect and lengthy explanations, which students find intimidating – that many non-specialists experience as exclusionary practices which try to tell these readers that their experiences as readers are “wrong.” 

Ultimately, this book can be used to help readers and writers, whether of artistic or scholarly texts, understand the contextual sensitivities that are inherent in reading and interpretation yet which are rarely articulated or acknowledged. As Cawsey notes, “[w]e have made great steps, as a discipline, in moving away from the overarching, over-generalized theories of the beginning and mid-century critics, which ignored individuals and cases in favour of broad images of the 'medieval mind',” concluding that “[w]hat is needed now is a renewal of abstraction, without an attendant loss of the material and concrete” (160). Cawsey herself has not sought to attempt this abstraction, though she does propose the concept of “swarm theory,” which she develops within the context of Patterson's work. I find that swarm theory, in Cawsey's brief outline, resonates closely with current fan practices: ideas are proposed and adopted rapidly, jumping from individual to individual, and then further refined by single persons who share and modify their ideas on the basis of quick or continual feedback from fellow interpreters as well as repeated or evolving viewings or readings of the original source material. Such swarms are encouraged by the rapid development and use of social media and micro-blogging sites, and move rapidly or invisibly across multiple media platforms. However, Cawsey's production of a history of audience criticism within the context of Chaucer studies seems to serve as a pre-history of the speculative work for which she calls: she makes no unique intervention in this book. This can be attributed to the limiting framework of a project that has undergone what appear to be only minor revisions from its original state as a dissertation: several typographical errors linger, all the more startling for the clean prose that Cawsey favors, and the simplicity of the history that Cawsey traces is marked by her studious care to avoid overt statements of her own positions. In Twentieth-Century Chaucer Criticism, Cawsey ultimately advocates balance and her monograph serves as an apt reminder that writers, readers, and audiences are all part of a dynamic ecosystem of content and exchange, enriched by the centuries of interpretation that characterize Chaucer's works.

Valerie B. Johnson 
Georgia Institute of Technology

Stahuljak, Pornographic Archaeology

Zrinka Stahuljak, Pornographic Archaeology: Medicine, Medievalism, and the Invention of the French Nation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 

Reviewed by: Elizabeth Emery (emerye@mail.montclair.edu)

Sexuality (and particularly medieval sexuality) so thoroughly preoccupied nineteenth-century French scholars, doctors, and policy makers that many of the well-known public health debates of the time -- about consanguinity, prostitution, communicable diseases, racial mixing, homosexuality, degeneration, and depopulation -- were grounded in beliefs about medieval mores.  Furthermore, Zrinka Stahuljak argues, the historical and medical representations of medieval sexuality and genealogy disseminated by such thinkers had a profound effect in the most unlikely of places: library organization, the Lachmannian stemma codicum, and newlywed bedrooms (promoted as bastions of “courtly love”).

These examples are just a few of the seemingly-unconnected topics that Stahuljak has brilliantly interwoven in this fascinating, ambitious and utterly unique investigation of what she calls “medical medievalism”: the “medical construction of the Middle Ages” by historians, writers, and philologists, doctors, and scientists.  This is ground-breaking work in medievalism studies, not least for bringing to public attention the critical importance of medieval history for the medical discourse of the nineteenth century and the magnitude of such medical theories for the philologists who established medieval studies as we know them today.  The book also sheds new light on how medieval sexuality was interpreted at this time, while bringing much-needed attention to nearly-forgotten “makers” of the Middle Ages like Romantic-era writer Paul Lacroix (le bibliophile Jacob), whose popular (and often liberal) interpretations of history led to much misconception about the cultural practices of the medieval period.
  
The book’s title, Pornographic Archaeology, though titillating (particularly in combination with the priapic medieval badge adorning its cover), is a bit misleading (albeit clever).  The book concerns neither pornography nor archaeology, at least in the modern sense. Stahuljak has borrowed this title from Lacroix, who used it to “arouse” readers (as she puts it) with these archaic terms in the section of his 1852 History of Prostitution dedicated to the “shameful streets” of Paris (pornography being etymologically-related to prostitution and “archaeology” as used liberally to refer to a cultural history based on the study of documents [131-32]).  Stahuljak has done the same; aside from the epilogue, her book is not about nineteenth-century excavations of medieval pornographic artifacts.  It is, in reality, about nineteenth-century archival “digs” into historical documents dealing with medieval sexuality.  Michel Foucault’s The History of Sexuality, with its emphasis on cultural context, discourse, and power structures, supplies the bulk of the theoretical framework.

I cannot do justice to the wealth of insights about “medical medievalism” provided by Stahuljak, but I can describe the volume’s structure and content in order to convey some of the volume’s major findings.  She has divided the book into three sections.  Each looks at sex from a different angle (“Sex and Blood,” “Sex and Race,” “Sex and Love”), and each shows how “a medieval concept acted upon the nineteenth-century medical opinions on social issues, as well as upon medical theories and hypotheses; how a certain idea of the Middle Ages was constructed around medical notions in the nineteenth century; and how this medical construction of the Middle Ages -- medical medievalism -- invariably shaped a certain way of thinking about the Middle Ages until the very end of the twentieth century and, in some cases, until today” (2-3).

The introduction and first section, “Sex and Blood,” are critical for laying out fundamental terms and issues.  They survey the progressive influence exerted by positivism in the development of both medicine and medievalism over the course of the nineteenth century in France.  This first section exposes the predominance of medical theories of heredity, espoused by figures such as Prosper Lucas, Benedict-Augustin Morel, and Jacques Moreau de Tours, who relied heavily upon historical anecdotes about the transmission of physical and mental traits over time and across families. The Middle Ages, seen as the origin of the French nation, was particularly germane to such studies since family medical histories could be intuited from royal histories.  The increased emphasis upon heredity, combined with debates about consanguinity (1856-1866) and a post-Revolutionary tendency to see the aristocracy as weak, led to a “pathologization of history.”  It also resulted in a nineteenth-century obsession with blood, no longer used as a metaphor signifying legal relationships (kinship), but now imagined in its material, biological sense (bloodlines).  

Stahuljak analyzes a number of nineteenth-century medical and scientific texts that illustrate this shift away from a socially-determined medieval conception of genealogy (legal acceptance of paternity) and toward a more biologically-determined nineteenth-century understanding of heredity (biological paternity).  This nineteenth-century obsession with heredity, influenced by the rise of Republicanism, recast the juridical framework that had governed medieval genealogy.  Instead, social reformers drew attention to the “bad blood” of the intermarried Ancien Régime nobles in order to educate the public about the dangers to the health of the nation represented by consanguineous marriages.  Stahuljak concludes this section with several long passages summarizing medieval historians’ disputes over how medieval genealogy functioned, and she defends Foucault’s open-ended concept of genealogy. 

In Part Two (“Sex and Race”), Stahuljak moves nineteenth-century French medical re-readings of genealogy to the colonial context, thus linking anxieties about homosexuality, sexually-transmitted disease, and racial mixing to new interpretations of medieval history that identified the Orient as the point of origin for sodomy and syphilis.  She provides a fascinating discussion of the fierce scholarly debates that raged over the Templars and their alleged sexual transgressions, most of which, she suggests, derived from an incorrect transcription of a medieval manuscript figuring the name “Mohammed” into “Baphomet” (an alleged idol worshiped by the Templars). This accident became the basis for much public fantasizing about the Templars' alleged Satanic practices (and French scholarly defense of their virtue). The identification of Gilles de Rais as Bluebeard was similarly based on the misinterpretation of manuscript sources and similarly exploited by writers and medical specialists who used him as a case study in sexual deviance.  These two examples, along with discussion of Joan of Arc, Gilles de Rais’s companion in arms, circle back to the conclusions of the first section, demonstrating that the perpetuation and elaboration of such “fictions” led to a “passage from historical to medical discourse” (115), and to a pathologization of non-heteronormative practices.  Public debate about these historical figures also tied into contemporary discussions about the inseparability of madness and genius; Gilles and Joan represented opposite ends of the same spectrum (while reflecting the anti-aristocratic bias of Third Republic France).

Part Three (“Sex and Love”) segues from this medical and geographical marginalization of non-procreative sexual acts into a complex discussion of chivalry and “courtly love,” exemplified through epic and romance, which came to be seen as particularly French values in the 1890s, thus displacing from the literary canon the more sexually-licentious behavior incarnated in the allegedly “Oriental” fabliaux.  Stahuljak traces the fading fortunes of the fabliaux as indicative of a shift from “Romantic archaeology” and its predilection for the histoire de moeurs (enthusiasm for collecting and displaying all manner of information about cultural history) to Romance philology, with its emphasis on scientific selection and classification (her discussion of the use of the Lachmannian stemma codicum in France is particularly interesting in light of the contemporary obsession with origins, genealogy, and heredity).  Stahuljak goes even further, though, uncovering fascinating intersections between the courtly and chivalrous ideals espoused by manuals for newlyweds and the divorce law instituted in fin-de-siècle France (1884) to help combat depopulation (understood as a by-product of the search for sexual fulfillment outside of unhappy marriages). “Courtly marriage” thus became a way of encouraging “healthy” procreation and repopulation, while emphasizing these allegedly “pure” French traditions as a counterpoint to their more dangerous less productive “Oriental” alternatives (homosexuality and prostitution).

The book concludes with an epilogue discussing the sale of Arthur Forgeais’s collection of 3,000 medieval lead badges (a number of which contained erotic images) to the Musée de Cluny in 1861-1862.  Stahuljak uses this final example to illustrate the triumph of authorized “courtly” models of sexuality, embraced by the medical establishment and philologists alike at the end of the nineteenth-century in France. Like Forgeais’s pilgrimage badges, displayed to the public while the erotic images remained hidden, idealized courtly models of medieval sexuality covertly replaced earlier generations’ overt exploration of medieval mores.  In the late nineteenth century medical professionals and philologists both created stereotypes about the “purity” and “charm” of the Middle Ages that persist today (Stahuljak begins the book with a number of examples of such received ideas).  She concludes by questioning such perceptions and by inviting reconsideration of what we really do know about medieval sexuality and its social implications at various moments of what we call the Middle Ages.  

Even such lengthy summary as this cannot capture the many brilliant insights Stahuljak has brought to this topic.  I have the most effusive praise for this book as a work of medievalism.  The book’s greatest strength -- its ambitious coverage of nineteenth-century medical interpretations of medieval history -- may also, however, be construed as a weakness, and I suspect that some nineteenth-century French historians may have reservations about the speed with which some claims -- such as those about French colonization and the conception of the Orient, attitudes toward prostitution, theories of the transmission of syphilis, the decadent movement, and rationale behind divorce courts -- are made.  Stahuljak covers so much ground so quickly that sweeping conclusions such as “thus medievalism and archaeology were synonymous in the romantic period” (145) appear without extensive justification. 

But Stahuljak does not claim to be writing a work of nineteenth-century French history.  Inspired by Foucault, her primary goal is to examine the conflicting discourses about medieval sexuality that circulated in the nineteenth century.  By that measure her book is supremely successful. By examining what was written about medieval sexuality in the nineteenth-century medical and scholarly contexts, Pornographic Archaeology exposes as frauds many of today’s assumptions about well-known medieval figures: widely-disseminated theories underlying accepted medical or social thought were quite often founded on mistranslations, misreadings, and misinterpretations.  The medicalization of history led to the appropriation of spurious anecdotes from the past as “scientific evidence” by doctors and scholars whose social status validated the “truth” of what they wrote. It is fascinating to see how medieval history, interpreted through the lens of nineteenth-century medical theories, came to influence the literary canons and historical accounts set in place at this time by philologists, themselves reliant on misinformed scientific theories about the Middle Ages.

Pornographic Archaeology provides an excellent illustration of medievalism at work -- nineteenth-century thinkers’ tendency to interpret the medieval period according to their own preoccupations -- and reveals the serious consequences of relying too heavily on secondary sources.  Stahuljak’s book provides a cautionary tale for all of us who “excavate” medieval archives in search of the “truth” about medieval life and should be required reading for scholars purporting to understand the methods and discourses underlying modern medieval studies.  
   
Elizabeth Emery
Montclair State University