Medieval Futures: Attitudes to the Future in the Middle Ages by J. A. Burrow , Ian P. Wei (review)

Abstract

158 Reviews works brilliantly. Menuge examines the question ofthe role ofthe mother in guardianship arrangements, a topic hitherto studied almost exclusively through the evidence provided by contemporary legislation, legal treatises, and cases. She observes that romances may inform and complement historical interpretations, noting that such study may shed light on the social and political roles expected of aristocratic parents and guardians. Her approach is of particular importance because the sceptical pose adopted in this volume in relation to all texts results, in some cases, in a reluctance on the part of contributors to connect their readings to any hypothesis about a putative historical reality. For instance, Katherine Lewis states explicitly that a particular issue of fact is not relevant to her argument, since she is concerned with the 'textually constructed "reality" presented by women's wills, and therefore deliberately does not seek to ascertain what correspondence this may have had with any historical or documentary reality' (p. 60). Some of the essays are entirely focused on legal documents, but deploy the methods of close reading more typically associated with literary criticism. This is most evident in the chapters by Emma Hawkes, Kim Phillips, and Cordelia Beattie, whose concerns are, respectively, women's knowledge of common law and equity courts in late medieval England, the law of rape from the twelfth to the fifteenthcenturies, and the residential arrangements of women without husbands. Beattie aims to of? fer a 'more critical approach to the sources' and reads poll-tax returns against other kinds of historical evidence, highlighting constructions which have proved useful to scholars, but which need to be unpacked and reconsidered. Other contributors play readings ofthe literature against the historical evidence: JenniferSmith, forexample, re-examines the notion that Occitan legal and customary practice favoured women, suggesting that previous studies have relied on too simplistic a correlation between literary representations and societal norms. The essays are presented chronologically according to the periods treated, but an order based on theme and methodology might have been more illuminating. Kather? ine Lewis's essay considers women's wills as autobiographical texts, thus suggesting a link to Victoria Thompson's comparison of the will written by a noble widow at the beginning of the eleventh century with narratives commissioned by the English queens Emma and Edith and the depiction of Wealtheow in Beowulf. The volume presents some difficulties for the reader: technical terms relating to wills are used without glosses; cause papers are a common documentary source, but that they are marriage cases is not explained until a footnote in the fifthchapter; part of the in? troduction has gone missing between pages ix and x. This is an extremely useful collection, however; above all, it offers an insight into the pitfalls and the rewards of reading historical and literary texts against one another, an approach which is in many ways the dominant methodology in medieval studies today. University of Manchester Louise Sylvester Medieval Futures: Attitudes to the Future in the Middle Ages. Ed. by J. A. Burrow and Ian P. Wei. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. 2000. xiv+188 pp. ?45; $90. ISBNo-85115-779-3. Quite apart from the quality of the individual contributions, what is really interesting about this book is the premiss on which ithas been compiled. The idea of the future is relevant to every age, a point which is well made by Jean-Claude Schmitt in Appropriating the Future', the firstessay in the collection. The way in which individuals and groups within a society deal with their anxieties about the time to come offers an invaluable insight into the way in which they think about themselves and their MLRy 98.1, 2003 159 world, and why they behave as they do in their own present. The obvious discourse fornegotiating the future is prophecy, but the volume does not focus entirely on this. Its strength lies in the way in which it examines a variety of differentdiscourses used during the Middle Ages for negotiating, or attempting to 'deal with', a future which was the site of anxiety and potential conflict. The book has three parts, each devoted to a particular aspect of 'medieval futures'. The first,'Thinking about the Future', concerns the management of...