Shame and Honor: A Vulgar History of the Order of the Garter by Stephanie Trigg (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Shame and Honor: A Vulgar History of the Order of the Garter by Stephanie Trigg Bonnie Wheeler Stephanie Trigg. Shame and Honor: A Vulgar History of the Order of the Garter. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Pp. 322. $55.00. Stephanie Trigg’s delightful book evokes rituals, accoutrements, setting, and anecdotes related to the Order of the Garter to solidify a new sub-discipline of cultural studies and ritual theory: heritage culture as a form of “symptomatic long history” (14). The trajectory of Trigg’s previous scholarship on the ricocheting and unstable relation between medieval studies and medievalism studies finds perfect synergy here in the Order of the Garter, which centers her discussion of the “diverse, fluctuating, and ongoing life of medieval traditions in postmedieval culture” (10). “It depends,” as one recent US president famously said, “on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is.” In the case of “Honi soit qui mal y pense,” the teasing French motto of the English Order of the Garter founded in the 1340s, much depends upon the meaning of “y.” That elusively allusive, quasi-pronominal phoneme can mean almost anything but not nothing. It has great mythic capital and is the touchstone for this study. The motto, perhaps devised as a response to a purported “wardrobe malfunction” by a lady at the court of Edward III, is nicely glossed by Trigg as a “small but powerful textual machine for generating explanations and etiological narratives” (73) as well as an “instrument for distributing a hierarchy of knowledge and royal favor” (75). These statements in small summarize the outer shell of Trigg’s book. The contemporary mantle of the Order even casts its cloak over the “messy, [End Page 445] desiring bodies of Charles and Camilla” (250), whose marriage in 2005 was affirmed at Saint George’s Chapel, built at Windsor to house Garter inductions and celebrations. The book touches on many moments that highlight the Order of the Garter’s capacity to absorb, celebrate, and mock its medieval persistence and revival. Trigg stresses (pace her title) ways in which the order shows that the honor conferred erases some shadowy form of shame. Once inducted, however, rules for Garter members are unbreakable: if you act or speak in some unapproved and dishonorable way according to your monarch, you can be stripped of all status. In the case of the Garter, with its daunting dandy’s one-upmanship of academic regalia—feathered cap, shield-sized blazon, gold necklace holding the Saint George pendant, swinging ribbons and cords—it is hard to imagine this as sartorial loss, but formal degradation marks absolute loss. Trigg shapes her work as a “vulgar history” not only because she resists the formal architecture of “proud” narrative history reined in by a strictly historical chronology, but also because she persistently returns to the malicious popular gossip that accrues to the Order: Is there not an awesome disproportion between the “trivial” and the “solemn” in the myth that yokes a woman’s dropped garter to the highest life-long honor that any English monarch can accord? There are so many histories of the Garter that a study of its heraldry and membership (always a mark of political and social alliance) is unnecessary, though Trigg mentions the absence of chronology so often and uneasily that one might think it a nice addition had the few blank pages at the end of the book collated in tiny print extant lists of its membership. There are, after all, only slightly more than a thousand persons who have been granted membership. It would also be interesting to know, in this book about shame and honor, how many of these have suffered formal expulsion. And how and by whom was the membership list manipulated to assure that the current Prince William would be touted as the thousandth recipient of the honor? Why not mention the other major recurrent royal “collar” order, that of the Golden Fleece? Trigg’s book is divided into three major parts: “Ritual Histories,” “Ritual Practices,” “Ritual Modernities.” Without strict chronological unfolding, these categories fold into each other and are sometimes difficult to distinguish. “Ritual Histories” discusses some odd rituals (like that...