Bits and Pieces: On Heather Bamford's Cultures of the Fragment

Abstract

Bits and Pieces:On Heather Bamford's Cultures of the Fragment Simone Pinet We have all seen medievalism take its work with fragments into a more serious engagement with the idea and theory of them in recent years, with research groups, blogs, and collaborative websites and journals across Europe addressing medievalism's fragment(ary) cultures, but Hispanomedievalism had yet to collect pieces to compose a corpus. With this book, Heather Bamford tackles this corporal and archival incompleteness, proposing ingenious solutions to the multiple challenges and opportunities offered by this dispersion and lack of a critical thread. The five chapters, introduction, and afterword are followed by an appendix with different sections of Mohanmad de Vera's Breviario Sunni; a bibliography; and an index. I will go briefly through the chapters to underline those critical concepts that are mobilized in each, and that have in some form remained with me, working with each other to make me reconsider the texts Professor [End Page 27] Bamford studies. And already here, I want to highlight how curious I find it that Bamford's book speaks to its community of readers as individuals: first when reading and, now, when writing about it I am reacting to how I experience those processes Bamford describes, to my own sense of the practices of literary and cultural criticism, to my own considerations and methods, suggesting that the archive itself is a series of fragmentary, personal, approaches—one is convinced already, before one begins. Starting with the distinction between the fragment and the fragmentary text in the first chapter, Bamford asks us to open up the concept and consider the fragment not only as object but simultaneously as the practice of reading and commenting literary texts (and indeed, even beyond them), considering how much of our everyday critical practices are those of fragmenting, of cutting up and setting apart, of imagining wholes and parts, bits and pieces. In the second chapter, "From Bound to Metonym: Early Modern and Modern Disuse of Chivalric Fragments," Bamford puts to work this "metonymic philology" to discuss the Amadís fragments and their critical import. I found the name she gives to this critical process tremendously useful because of its conceptual simplicity and clarity, bringing with it a whole series of practices of scholarship that I began to see through this lens. This chapter also concludes that the disuse of these fragments both in the early modern period and in our own scholarly period might be due to an exhaustion of the fragments' possibilities beyond their material utility, and this idea of the exhaustion of matter, which necessarily limits their capacity to offer material for criticism, in critical key lingers still in the margins of my reading. "Used to Pieces: The Muwashshahas and Their Romance Kharjas from Al-Andalus to Cairo" brought in yet another instrumental phrase, "critical fragmentation" (the study of the romance kharjas as separate from their muwashshahas), a term that condenses the different practices (material, spiritual, intellectual) of fragmentation that scholarly work implies. Beyond research and writing, I think the transformative potential of this term will be felt most acutely in a pedagogical setting, thematized in class and recast as a critical opportunity. The fourth chapter, "Faith in Fragments," focuses on the spiritual use of fragments, understood now as pieces of different works in other materials, such as the inscription of [End Page 28] the names of God found in the rafters of the Aljafería in Zaragoza, and the well-known shingle with verses from the Poema de Fernán González found in Villamartín de Sotoscueva in the 1960s, pointing to what I understood as forms of prosthesis, or as excretions and insertions that become part of another body but remain somehow separate. Finally, the last chapter, "The Fragment among the Moriscos: Mohanmad de Vera's Culture of Compilation" focuses on intellectual fragmentation as an operation of collective memory, adding new terms and critical opportunities—prosthesis, spiritual and intellectual fragmentation, fragment as collective memory. Functioning as case studies, the chapters carry out different theoretical hypotheses laid out in the introduction. The focus on fragments forces the necessary questioning of central processes of scholarly study such as collecting, or...