Medieval Crime and Social Control ed. by Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace

Abstract

REVIEWS social order, but might not necessarily want to reinvent the anus as their symbolic grave. Yet Dinshaw’s success in inflecting postmodernism’s rethinking of history and temporality with the queer and the medieval (she is equally committed to both) is indisputable. Some sense of this is conveyed by the arresting artwork on the cover: a painting by Roger Brown that fuses a Boschian medieval imaginary (lurid flames, silhouetted devils and angels) with a Daliesque (post)modern one (moustaches, strangely windowed beards, swagged curtains). This image perfectly captures the queerly disjunctive temporalities of the premodern and the postmodern that Dinshaw’s book strives to articulate. In this volume Dinshaw has probably done more than any medievalist to compel medievalists and nonmedievalists alike to rethink how we touch the past and how it touches us, as scholars and as bodies. She has raised the stakes for all of us. Ruth Evans Cardiff University Barbara A. Hanawalt and David Wallace, eds. Medieval Crime and Social Control. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999. Pp. xvi, 259. $49.95 cloth. $19.95 paper. This timely collection of essays goes a long way toward defining a field of inquiry frequently mislabeled as ‘‘literature and law.’’ As the editors state in their introduction, questions of law and representation provide ideal venues for the investigation of relations among such diverse sources as ‘‘legal treatises, statutes, court cases, court poems, romances, canonical texts, and comic tales (p. xvi). The study of the law creates a ‘‘common currency of discourse’’ that allows both historians and literary scholars to investigate and challenge ‘‘hard-and-fast distinctions between theory and practice, the ‘fictional’ and the ‘real’, the literary and the historical’’ (p. xvi.). Salutary as such an ambition may be, one might fear that the collection itself would be dominated by textual analyses of legal rhetorics and literary discourse, excluding consideration of the material and social practices of the law and of literature. But as the previous volumes of the Minnesota ‘‘Medieval Cultures’’ series would 551 ................. 8972$$ CH21 11-01-10 12:23:15 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER suggest, this collection achieves its goal of interdisciplinarity without sacrificing investigative rigor. In this sense, it is a model for those wishing to carry on research and scholarship that articulates the past but does not erase its differences from the present. The field set out by this collection might broadly be called ‘‘law and representation’’; all of the essays address—directly or indirectly—the problem of interpreting legal evidence in light of its status as privileged representation, or as the representation of privilege. Because the focus of the volume is on ‘‘crime and social control’’ (rather than, say, property and politics)—on the specific area of the law devoted to relations of power among persons and between persons and institutions—this problem becomes especially pointed. As several contributors remark, crime is a category whose definition can be enforced only by the enfranchised, though it may be invoked rhetorically by any group. Four essays in particular explore the problem: both the first and last chapters (Claude Gauvard’s ‘‘Fear of Crime in Late Medieval France’’ and William Perry Marvin’s ‘‘Slaughter and Romance: Hunting Reserves in Late Medieval England’’) as well as James H. Landman’s ‘‘ ‘The Doom of Resoun’: Accommodating Lay Interpretation in Late Medieval England’’ and William Ian Miller’s ‘‘In Defense of Revenge.’’ Gauvard and Marvin map, in France and England respectively, a general trend toward greater state control over and interest in crime during the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Both illustrate this trend by examining narratives about crime: the Chronique scandaleuse (and predecessors) for Gauvard and the romance Sir Degrevant for Marvin. Marvin in particular does a brilliant job of linking this literary representation to both an act of legislation (the game law of 1390) and a historical series of events (the Northern Rebellion of the Beckwiths in the 1380s). A very different historical focus obtains in Miller’s account of revenge in Icelandic sagas and contemporary ‘‘vengeance films’’ (Death Wish, Dirty Harry, and the like); by illustrating the ways in which revenge in Icelandic culture was bounded and constrained by the law...