Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning ed. by Robert M. Stein and Sandra Pierson Prior (review)

Abstract

ROBERT M. STEIN AND SANDRA PIERSON PRIOR, eds., Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Manning. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. Pp. 505. ISBN: 0-268-04111-3. $37.50. Reading Medieval Culture does what a good festschrift ought to do. First and foremost, it honors the distinguished career of its dedicatee, Robert M. Hanning. Hanning, whose career (so far) has spanned four decades, covering an eclectic range of subjects from the Venerable Bede to the Italian Renaissance, has produced groundbreaking work in medieval historiography, romance, Chaucer, and the twelfth-century Renaissance. A glance at his bibliography confirms that there are not many subjects in medieval studies today to which he has not had something insightful to contribute. The editors of his festschrift, Robert M. Stein and Sandra Pierson Prior, have gathered together twenty original essays, written by a wide range of both eminent and emerging scholars-Manning's friends, students, and colleagues. While not every essay in the collection is a page-turner, many-perhaps more than one might expect from the genre-do what Manning himself has done so frequently-speak to us in novel and provocative ways that open up fertile areas for thinking about the Middle Ages. The editors remark that what Hanning often accomplishes in his own scholarship is elegantly to knit together the often unruly strands that mark the conflicts in medieval studies. He is able to play off close reading against a cultural studies model or the free play of meaning against the power of the social order to constrain meaning. What unites the essays in the volume, they argue, are the ways in which, like Hanning, the authors account for the complex ways in which the texts they examine 'are situated in their own time, mediated historically to us through other texts and other readers, and, finally, are read within the context of our own social questions and disciplinary structures' (3). The editors divide the essays into three sections that map neatly onto Hanning's scholarly interests. The first section takes up his foundational work on history and romance. Particularly striking in this section, though it is never mentioned, is the importance placed on social and literary geography, the intersections of time and space, in the constructions of the particular identities-individual, ethnic, and religious-romance and history simultaneously bring into existence and naturalize. Essays by Nicholas Howe and Sarah Spense explore the relations of particular spaces-Jarrow and Saint-Denis-to the Venerable Bede and Abbot Suger respectively. Monika Otter and Charlotte Gross explore the workings of time in history and philosophy. Otter's essay on the relationship between past and future in medieval history writing is one of the standouts in the volume, a delight to read. …