Reality Fictions: Romance, History, and Governmental Authority, 1025–1180 (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Reality Fictions: Romance, History, and Governmental Authority, 1025–1180 Laurie A. Finke Robert M. Stein, Reality Fictions: Romance, History, and Governmental Authority, 1025–1180. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2006. 294 pp. ISBN: 978–0–268–04120–5. $30. Robert M. Stein’s Reality Fictions begins with what has become by now a critical commonplace of twelfth century literary history: the observation that romance and secular history emerge simultaneously in the French speaking courts of the Norman and Capetian ruling families and that the historical fortunes of these two narrative genres that seem, to us, contradictory are inextricably entwined in ways that confound what, again for us, are foundational categories—the distinction between fantasy and reality. Hence the oxymoronic title Reality Fictions. Stein locates the simultaneous rise in French speaking European courts of both historiography and romance in the process of state formation, in the complex imbrication of political and literary innovation during a period of tumultuous social upheaval. The two genres, he maintains, share formal affinities, spring from the same cultural needs, and, most importantly, do the same cultural work. In a brief but important theoretical introduction, Stein introduces the main threads of his complex argument, which sees literary representation not as a pale imitation of some political ‘real,’ but rather as both producer and production of political and social transformation. Stein’s attempt to understand how political communities were imagined through literary forms in the twelfth-century Anglo-Norman and Capetian dynasties deserves attention because it moves discussions of medieval political community away from debates about whether something like the nation existed in the twelfth century, to a more interesting consideration of the ‘wide variety of governmental entities that existed outside of what we understand as the national state’ (3). Stein argues rightly that, for medieval Europe, ‘the nation is simultaneously too small and too large to be a useful analytic unit’ (5). Drawing upon the work of the sociologist Charles Tilly, Stein explores state formation in the Norman and Capetian ‘empires,’ formations marked by ‘concatenating central military organizations, thin regional administrations, trading networks, and organizations of tribute in which local and regional rulers—often maintaining cultural identities distinct from that of the empire’s center—enjoyed great autonomy in return for collaborations in the collection of tribute and support in the empire’s military campaigns’ (3). Historiography and romance participated in the attempts of the ruling elites of these empires to centralize administrative control, eliminate competing claims to authority, and ‘find more efficient means of extracting capital and military service from their subjects’ (4). This ‘new efficiency,’ Stein argues, depended on writing, creating a new class of literate individuals who transformed writing from a liturgical instrument to an instrument of secular power. The trick is to explore this process without making [End Page 90] the state seem like an inevitable outcome of the process of state formation, to make visible ‘countervailing tendencies’ and alternative centers of power that challenged the new hegemony. The four chapters that follow examine this thesis using ‘carefully selected examples’ chosen from geographic ‘borders rather than political centers’ (6). The high points of the book for me were its first and last chapters. In these chapters the texts chosen most forcefully map out new literary and historical terrain for Latin and vernacular writing in the twelfth century. Chapter one examines the historiographical projects undertaken by Gerard I, bishop of Cambria. As with many of the chronicles of the period, Gerard’s historiographical work served to advance and centralize Episcopal power in the region, neutralizing competing powers by creating a chronological succession of bishops whose spiritual and temporal power is handed down in an unbroken chain. Chapter two turns to narratives that contested the centralization of Norman powers in England in the years after the conquest, focusing on accounts of the death of Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon King. The third chapter turns, not entirely successfully I believe, from history to romance. Moving from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s ‘pseudohistorical’ Historia regum Brittaniae to romances by Chrétien de Troyes (Chevalier au Lion) and Marie de France (Guigemar), Stein’s purpose is to demonstrate that, just as historians absorbed...