Cultures of the Fragment: Uses of the Iberian Manuscript, 1100–1600 by Heather Bamford

Abstract

Reviewed by: Cultures of the Fragment: Uses of the Iberian Manuscript, 1100–1600 by Heather Bamford Vincent Barletta Heather Bamford. Cultures of the Fragment: Uses of the Iberian Manuscript, 1100–1600. u of toronto p, 2018. 272 pp. near the end of the film version of Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient (directed by Anthony Minghella, 1996), the British archaeologist Peter Maddox (Julian Wadham) attempts to apologize to his friend Count László de Almásy (Ralph Fiennes): "I have to teach myself not to read too much into everything. It comes from too long having to read so much into hardly anything at all." As an aspiring medievalist in the mid-90s, I read this apology as a warning. Surrounded by fragments, bits, and scraps, and (more importantly) lacking the training at that point to deal with them, I braced myself for the hermeneutic shambles that medieval studies might just make of my life. Two decades later, and having never fully resolved Maddox's warning, I approached Heather Bamford's new book, Cultures of the Fragment, with a mixture of hope and skepticism. Might taking the matter of fragments head-on and from a uniquely medievalist perspective provide an escape from the very real dangers of reading "too much into everything"? From another perspective, can the fragments that Ibero-medievalists routinely work with (and through) ever be properly defined and theorized without reduction or anachronism? Bamford's great contribution in this book is to offer a meta-level and decidedly practice-centered approach to the question of manuscript fragments. That is, her unit of analysis is not the textual fragment per se, but the various acts by which it is created, retrieved, and put to use. Many of these acts are recognizably philological and modern, and the majority of Bamford's book, in fact, revolves around an expert analysis (from the inside, as it were) of the matter, desires, and practices that make up the very backbone of her discipline. Cultures of the Fragment begins with an introduction that delimits Bamford's argument. By "fragment," for example, she means quite specifically "pieces of material text separated from their whole texts as a result of an [End Page 207] intentional act" (4). It is the "intentional act" that forms the axis for her study, as it is upon this act—intentional, but also interactional, historical, and socially embedded—that she seeks to reconstruct the "cultures" of her title. This is possible, according to Bamford, given the ambivalent nature of such fragments: while they cannot but signify a lack, they nonetheless also "convey a sort of completeness" (4). In this ambivalence, and in the human Handwerk of exploiting it, Bamford seeks to disclose key features of manuscript culture that have remained latent. Chapter 1 deals with the Castilian epic cycle revolving around Rodrigo Díaz de Vivar. Bamford's principal concern here is not with the fragmentary texts that make up what scholars have conventionally (if anachronistically) referred to as the "Spanish medieval epic" but rather with the "way in which lack and completeness are conceptualized in studies and other uses of the epic" (23). At stake here is how the physical characteristics of manuscript texts can "convey fragmentariness" (24) and thus move readers to make use of them as metonymies for a whole. It is out of such practices, after all, that the Castilian epic tradition has come to be, and Bamford has ingeniously chosen to examine: (1) the physical affordances of the manuscript witnesses and (2) the uses that have emerged from these affordances. The chapter ends with the practice of the critic, driven by a need to make a whole out of what is not. Here, one might imagine, we find Ramón Menéndez Pidal and Peter Maddox, shaking hands in the Libyan desert that stretches out between what they have and what they must say. Chapter 2 examines the early modern tendency to rip out folios from medieval chivalric romances and use them as binding material in early print books. Focusing on folios from the sole extant copy of Amadís de Gaula and Tristán de Leonís, Bamford unpacks the productive tension between the...