Talk and Textual Production in Medieval England by Marisa Libbon

Abstract

Reviewed by: Talk and Textual Production in Medieval England by Marisa Libbon Marcel Elias marisa libbon, Talk and Textual Production in Medieval England. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2021. Pp. 245. isbn: 978-0-8142-8113-0. $99.95. This engaging and elegantly written monograph explores the role of 'talk' in shaping the production and informing the reception of texts in late medieval England. It takes as its case study the figure of Richard I, whose reign in absentia and exploits on crusade catalyzed talk and textual production long after his death, and whose cultural legacy was harnessed to various ends, including to create a sense of national identity during the Hundred Years War. Two chapters are devoted to legal and visual sources, backed up by their contexts in a range of documents, while three others discuss the Middle English romance of Richard Coeur de Lion, preserved in one fragment and seven manuscripts spanning the early fourteenth to the late fifteenth centuries. Underpinning this emphasis on the Richard Coeur de Lion corpus is the belief that 'engaging with each manuscript copy of a text is essential to the praxis of close reading, historical studies, and manuscript studies' (p. 13). In the introduction, Libbon makes the case for an approach to literary history centering on talk. For her, the relationship between unwritten and written discourse is one of mutual influence: talking prompts writing, which elicits discussion and debate. Talk, Libbon argues, may be recovered by 'cross-reading different media in simultaneous circulation in a particular time and place' (p. 8) and by studying the variations among manuscript copies of a given work, for 'each manuscript copy in a textual tradition is a product of choice and relativism that preserves and responds to local talk and common knowledge or cultural memory' (p. 9). Each of the five chapters develops an aspect of her methodology. Chapter One opens the analysis counterintuitively, yet effectively, not with medieval talk but with modern scholarly talk about Richard Coeur de Lion, disseminated at conferences and preserved in articles, books, and editions. Libbon [End Page 155] argues that the scholarly tendency to focus on the more fantastical episodes of the Richard Coeur de Lion tradition (those featuring the king's demonic mother and acts of cannibalism, in particular) and to view the development of this tradition as one of consolidation (from fragmentary, historical base to 'complete' narrative, merging history and fantasy) paints a misleading picture of the extant manuscript evidence. This distortion may in part be ascribed to the shortcomings of the only published critical edition of the romance, the Austrian philologist Karl Brunner's 1913 Richard Löwenherz. This edition, Libbon shows, was influenced by talk circulating in Vienna at the time of its production, some of it by way of nineteenth-century England and Scotland. While otherwise persuasive, this chapter would have benefited from engagement with work that departs from dominant scholarly trends in either sidelining the cannibalism episodes (Lee Manion's Narrating the Crusades [2014]) or discussing their lack of popularity in late medieval England (my 'Violence, Excess, and the Composite Emotional Rhetoric of Richard Coeur de Lion' [2017]). The second chapter turns to the late thirteenth century, when Edward I's quo warranto statute required of royal subjects that they demonstrate in court continuous ancestral use of their lands and privileges since the reign of Richard. Focusing on verbatim and officially redacted legal testimonies, among other sources, Libbon argues that Edward's legislation gave rise to widespread, class-crossing public talk about the time of King Richard, which became a touchstone in the formation of individual and collective identities. Chapter Three discusses the uncaptioned battle images of Oxford, Christ Church, MS 92, an early fourteenth-century adaptation of the Secreta Secretorum made for Edward III. Libbon draws on visual, textual, and material evidence to reconstruct the talk and rumors that would have prompted contemporary readers to identify these images with Richard's siege of Acre in 1191 during the Third Crusade. The last two chapters challenge scholarship that views Richard Coeur de Lion as the product of aggregation and consolidation, from fragmentary to complete version, proposing instead that each manuscript copy reflects the active...