The Presence of Rome in Medieval and Early Modern Britain: Texts, Artefacts and Beliefs. Andrew Wallace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xviii+248.

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Previous articleNext article FreeBook ReviewThe Presence of Rome in Medieval and Early Modern Britain: Texts, Artefacts and Beliefs. Andrew Wallace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. Pp. xviii+248.Aaron KitchAaron KitchBowdoin College Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAndrew Wallace’s far-reaching study explores the “phenomenology of Rome’s afterlives” in medieval and early modern “Britain” broadly conceived (21). Expanding a conventional dyad of Rome as both place and idea, Wallace addresses the vestigial traces (uestigia) and material facts (facta) of the eternal city as they shape both self and world across dozens of texts and over numerous centuries. As he notes in his opening pages, “Britannos” appears in Virgil’s Eclogues around the same time that Julius Caesar invaded the island of the same name, a territory that many Romans regarded as “wholly sundered from the world” (3). In the much later work Hydriotaphia by Thomas Browne, Wallace shows how Roman objects entangle themselves in regular experience, part of a long tradition of works Wallace traces to the imperial and ecclesiastical histories written in the wake of Rome’s withdrawal from Britannia around 400 CE. For medieval historians such as Bede, Rome’s influence is so great that it helps to make “a home for the body in the world” (66). This resonant phrase, which recurs throughout the book, anchors Wallace’s focus on Rome’s impact on ideas about the self (chap. 3), practices of language learning (chap. 4), and attitudes toward death (chap. 5).For Wallace, Rome is both a distant empire and a familiar experience within what Stanley Cavell calls the “order of the ordinary,” a quotidian space that mingles past and present, self and world (5).1 Like Leonard Barkan in Unearthing the Past (1999), Wallace addresses the physical remnants of Rome as manifested in objects such as coins, tablets, mosaic floors, sword hilts, mile markers, baths, dykes, combs, urns, and glass shards that medieval and early modern inhabitants of “Britain” handled frequently (57). But where Barkan represents Roman artefacts as strange and enigmatic, Wallace defines them as “perpetually familiar” (72). The book identifies a central tension between Rome as a site of corrupted Catholicism for Protestants and as a fountain of wisdom for Renaissance humanists. Spenser, Donne, Montaigne, Petrarch, Bacon, and Milton all address the doubleness of Rome as both a “repository of ancient virtues” and “the home of the Antichrist” (121). For all of its “abominations,” however, Rome endured in part by insinuating itself into the schools, shaping both the study of grammar and the very concept of selfhood that they formulate.In chapter 4, Wallace regards the seemingly pedantic pursuit of the well-named seventh-century grammarian Virgilius Maro Grammaticus about whether “ego” has a vocative case as a philosophical inquiry into whether Latin as a language seems to capture “everything that was believed to be worth capturing,” including the self (133). Wallace attempts to link such philosophical interest in grammar as a way of describing the self to later inquiries by Kierkegaard and others. Taking the long view, Wallace suggests at one point that Augustine may be “in effect, already mapping the self as a Kierkegaardian relation” (164). This allusion, like others to Nietzsche, Cavell, and Heidegger, enlivens the study and gestures toward a theoretical apparatus bridging medieval and early modern literature with more modern philosophy, but such an apparatus does not become fully coherent anywhere in the book.Wallace cannot possibly track all aspects of Roman influence over the period in question, of course. But there are some potentially relevant topics that do not find their way into his study, including the significance of Roman republicanism (and empire) to English state building. And with reference to his study of Latin, he does not mention the distinctive unease that Vives, Erasmus, and other architects of European humanism felt with regard to the ethics of Ovid, Terence, Plautus, and other authors they nevertheless placed at the center of reformed programs of study in the sixteenth century. He also skips over the important debates at Elizabeth’s court surrounding the value of Ciceronian rhetoric, leading many authors to reject Roman models of syntax in the 1590s. And what does “Britain” signify for Wallace? The term is both slippery and politically contentious. In one sense, it evokes the pre-Conquest idea of “Britannia” as a space of Roman settlement, but as such it also suggests the failure of Roman settlement, given the departure of Roman soldiers in the fourth century. “British” may refer to Brittonic peoples who spoke Celtic languages (among others), though “Britons” can refer to the Welsh in particular or the British more broadly. “Britain” was and is an aspirational category of unity at odds with historical realities. By the sixteenth century, “Britannia” encompassed the dream of a unified Scotland, England, and Wales that received much lip service from monarchs such as James I but was not realized in any formal sense for decades beyond his death. Rome therefore shapes the idea of “Britain” in complex ways that Wallace does not address. The enduring presence of Celtic tribes and Germanic-speaking people in the “United Kingdom” also challenges the Roman-ness of “Britain” as a category. The troubling and ahistorical efforts of some modern white nationalists to appropriate “Anglo-Saxon” culture and (pseudo-)history remind us about what is at stake in such debates over terminology. It would seem to behoove Wallace to make some effort to define this central category of geography and identity in his study despite the difficulty involved in the task.Another concern is the ambitious breadth of focus, which occasionally does the overall argument disservice. For example, the final chapter, “The Dead,” which relies perhaps too much on the work of the historian Peter Marshall, loses some of its argumentative force as it moves from Augustine to Dante to Chaucer to Thomas More to Donne, with stops along the way to consider Reformation debates over purgatory. Wallace moves so quickly from reading to reading that his ideas do not always germinate fully (though his reading of the “dirge” as a genre and of the love-hate relationship of early modern humanists and reformers for Rome is a treasure). Readers hoping for careful case studies of individual authors will be disappointed, even though Wallace does quote lengthy passages from individual works in Latin, Old English, and French (mostly with English translations, but sometimes in the body of the text, sometimes in the notes, and sometimes, oddly, nowhere at all).Still, the work is a masterpiece of comparative literature in the best sense of that term. It is innovative, well researched, and clearly written, and it deepens and enriches our understanding of “Rome” as a place, idea, and transcendent category of selfhood in medieval and early modern “Britain.”Notes1. Stanley Cavell, “Introductory Note to ‘The Investigations’ Everyday Aesthetics of Itself,’” in The Literary Wittgenstein, ed. Jon Gibson and Wolfgang Huemer (London: Routledge, 2004), 19. Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 118, Number 4May 2021 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/713339 Views: 548Total views on this site HistoryPublished online January 20, 2021 For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.