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 Nicole G. Corrigan Bamford, Heather. Cultures of the Fragment: Uses of the Iberian Manuscript, 1100-1600. U of Toronto P, 2018. xi + 257 pp. ISBN: 978-1-4875-0240-9. Heather Bamford's book examines fragments of medieval Spanish manuscripts, looking at their production and circulation in the Middle Ages, the sixteenth century, and the present day. Her objects of study are diverse—ranging from fragments of chivalric romances to Morisco literature—as she considers how and why these fragments were originally made and the impact that their fragmentation had on how they are studied today. The three main types of fragments that she addresses are physical fragments (manuscripts re-used as book bindings or covers), spiritual fragments (talismans and magical objects), and intellectual fragments (compilations). She aims to show that the creation of most fragments was intentional rather than accidental and to open up engagement with fragments in ways that go beyond questions of legibility. The first chapter, "Fragment and Fragmentary in the Iberian Epic," is the longest in the book, and it lays out her method for interpreting textual fragments, taking epics as her case study. All surviving medieval Spanish epics, she observes, are fragmentary, missing anywhere from a few to hundreds of lines; this condition is rather unusual for the corpus of epics in medieval Europe. Her main examples in this chapter are the Cantar de mío Cid, the Roncesvalles, and the Mocedades de Rodrigo, which she sees as existing on a continuum from fragmentary to fragment. This distinction is key to the chapter. "Fragmentary" implies a more complete text, for which it is easier to reconstruct what is missing, while "fragment" implies a text defined by what it lacks. Although both fragmentary texts and fragments tend to be the focus of reconstructive projects, Bamford notes that fragments less frequently feature as objects of literary study, something that she seeks to remedy in this book. The chapter broadly considers why fragments are made and how their status as a fragment impacts how they have been studied. She first addresses the historiography of fragments, pointing out that a great deal of scholarship around fragments has been dedicated to "restoring" them, or hypothesizing [End Page 159] about what is missing. In general, Bamford urges us to resist the temptation to restore a fragment, although she acknowledges it is difficult to do so. According to the author, "this piecing together of facts and conjecture of lost plot points, while interesting and successful in drawing some attention to the work, does not restore it to something that better resembles the whole" (31). This is one of her more thought-provoking contributions: the encouragement to find value in the fragment as a fragment, rather than to go searching for what could ultimately never be recovered. Bamford concludes the chapter by asking why fragments were created, both generally and in the specific case of the epic poems. While she pushes against the common desire to speculate over the original contents of a fragment, she does speculate over the intentions behind making a fragment, although her conclusions are often rooted in the material surface of the surviving text. She emphasizes that textual fragmentation was rarely a matter of censorship, but rather due to more practical reasons. Sometimes the scribes of a codex may not have had a complete model themselves; at other times, palimpsests were created simply because the text appeared to be out of date, was written in a rarely used language, or no longer seemed useful to the present user. Chapter Two, "From Bound to Metonym: Early Modern Disuse of Chivalric Fragments," looks at chivalric texts that were re-used as binding materials in the early modern era. The aim of this chapter is to call attention to how disuse of a manuscript in the early modern era (leading to its fragmentation and use in bindings) has led to its subsequent disuse in modern scholarship. She here applies the method she laid out in the first chapter: rather than searching for "missing symbolic codes" of fragments, she more productively engages with the fragmented texts and...