Theory and the Premodern Text (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Theory and the Premodern Text Pearl Ratunil Paul Strohm. Theory and the Premodern Text. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2000. xvi +269 pp. There are reasons why medievalist Paul Strohm’s fourth book is titled Theory and the Premodern Text with the word “theory” preceding the word “premodern,” for this book discusses more directly than his previous ones his debt to theory in reading medieval texts. Since 1989, with the publication of Social Chaucer, Strohm has distinguished himself in applying new historical methods to reading medieval texts. He has read statutes, chronicles, and legal documents alongside Chaucer and not only made sense of all of them but discovered new possibilities for reading well-trod poems like Chaucer’s “Lak of Stedfastnesse.” In any other field this would probably be more unanimously praised but in Medieval Studies, Strohm’s readings have been called “impenetrable,” “perverse,” and [End Page 223] “anachronistic.” As interdisciplinary as Medieval Studies intends to be, scholarship is often assessed on strict disciplinary categories and Strohm has confounded a few medievalists by being a literary scholar who writes about historical documents. What has made the situation more difficult for Strohm is that until quite recently most medievalists were not widely trained in literary theory and even now many may disdain it. Strohm’s success then—he is now the Tolkien Professor at Oxford—has depended upon balancing the rigors of medieval scholarship (Latin, Old French, paleography, philology) against the equally demanding methods of practice theory, feminism, and psychoanalysis. To some extent, he managed this in the first three books by foregrounding the medieval texts and underplaying his theoretical interests. Despite these efforts, however, this did not stop one reviewer from describing Strohm’s last book England’s Empty Throne: Usurpation and the Language of Legitimation 1399–1422 (1998) as burdened with “the heavy baggage of literary theory.” Theory and the Premodern Text is divided into four different sections of three essays each, with each section centered on a particular interest. In the first section Strohm displays the abilities of practice theory and speech-act philosophy. The essays in the second section are linked by an interest in time and narrative with an essay titled “Chaucer’s Troilus as Temporal Archive,” which argues for an “implicit diachrony” (93) in the synchronous. The essays in the third section focus on aspects of history and the fourth on psychoanalysis and Medieval Studies. The essays are loosely collected around these topics and the connections between essays are implied rather than direct. Within two essays are pointed critiques of medievalists and theorists. In “Coronation as Legible Practice,” Strohm addresses his medieval colleagues, directly chiding them for their complacency and urging them to be “antidisciplinary,” to prefer “those knowledges which are underrecognized or unrecognized within existing disciplinary terms” (33). The knowledge he advocates is that of Pierre Bourdieu and Anthony Giddens. The irony here is that for most practitioners of theory these are not “underrecognized” writers; but for a roomful of medievalists, they might be. In this essay, originally presented as an address to the Illinois Medieval Association, Strohm analyzes minor ritual flaws in ten-year-old Richard II’s coronation and shows how pro-Lancastrian chroniclers saw a lost slipper as a portent of kingly misfortune. This is Strohm at his best, noticing the seemingly minor detail (a child’s lost slipper, a man lifting a boy to his shoulders in congratulations) and finding its structural ritual significance. Strohm recognizes his debt to Bourdieu and writes of practice theory that it “offers us a grasp of the exceptional at its moment of production” [author’s emphasis] (47). In this essay, the exceptional moment is a slipper falling from a boy’s foot. Strohm, however, chides not just medievalists but also criticizes postmodernists in an essay titled “Postmodernism and History.” In this essay, Strohm takes postmodernists to task for totalizing the Middle Ages. According to Strohm, while postmodernists have an interest in complexity and disorder, there is also a tendency to deny that same complexity to the Middle Ages: “most postmodernist practitioners indulge a furtive and dishonest relation to the medieval past” (158). The reason, Strohm suggests, is that the Middle Ages exists...