rary scholarship. There is every reason to look forward to its future activities with great interest. Florida State University William Cloonan WARREN, MICHELLE R. Creole Medievalism: Colonial France and Joseph Bédier’s Middle Ages. Minneapolis: UP Minnesota, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8166-6526-6. Pp. xxxii + 379. $25. Warren’s wide-ranging book tells the story of desire for wholeness and belonging , played out in the nationalist discourse of Third-Republic France as well as in the microcosm of Joseph Bédier’s scholarship on medieval literature. Weaving together strands of biography, medieval studies, post-colonial perspectives, and notions of Nora’s lieux de mémoire, Warren suggests how Bédier’s marginalized status as Réunionnais leads him to champion France’s imperial mission civilisatrice in his vision of the Middle Ages, influencing the direction of medieval studies for decades. Further, she argues that examining the meaning of the medieval through the refracting lens of créolité questions the “traditional binarisms of imperial discourse ” and reveals how creole medievalism simultaneously supports and opposes notions of national history (xii). Warren situates her inquiry in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war, tracing the subsequent rise of French nationalism and renewed nationalist feeling throughout the colonies. She shows how the study of the Middle Ages— increasingly portrayed as the foundation of national identity—played a political role, becoming an expression of anti-German sentiment and French superiority. Wresting the Chanson de Roland from proprietary claims of German philologists, a generation of French medievalists touted the Chanson, with its imperialist and crusading subtext, as quintessentially French. At the same time, thinkers like Ernest Renan defined France as a “feeling” rather than a geography (17), thereby compensating for territorial loss and encouraging a new sense of national belonging among the colonies. More concretely, as Warren demonstrates, the Third Republic strategically enlisted the medieval and colonial monuments of Paris’s expositions universelles to help heal the wounds of France’s defeat. The expositions’ juxtaposition of colonial pavilions and reconstructed “medieval” sites (illustrated with numerous photographs) symbolized France’s imperial glories in both space and time. While her discussion of the expositions appears at times tangential, it underscores the increasingly tenuous position of Bédier’s Réunion, never exotic or French enough to justify any privileged status. In her examination of Bédier’s life and scholarship, Warren offers examples of the conjunction of medievalism with the réunionnais creole experience. Because Réunion was originally uninhabited, descendants of French immigrants claimed a special, direct relation to the mother country; their racialist elitism was reinforced by a chivalric code inherited from aristocratic colonizers. Warren accords a deeply symbolic status to the image of the adolescent Bédier seated under a mango reading Roland. She argues that his embrace of French medieval studies allowed him to heal the fracture produced by colonial exile and replace exclusion with a racialized sense of belonging. In the case of Roland in particular, Warren contends, Bédier’s translation reduces ambiguities and overdetermines binary oppositions; it also Reviews 839 ignores the role of material culture as shared by pagans and Christians alike. Warren’s treatment of Bédier’s theories, analyses, and translations reveals how his conception of medieval genres mirrors his idealized vision of authentic Frenchness. A final chapter explores the polyvalent “imperial debris” (224) of medievalism in today’s creole culture. Warren’s research is exhaustive, the connections she traces are rich and suggestive , and her photographic illustrations give real density to the portrayal of place and character. She offers fine analyses of texts, and she succeeds in conveying the distinctive status of Réunion as well as some measure of the interplay between creole longing and medievalist belonging. However, her claims are not always convincing. How does Bédier’s young love for his cousin, for example, give his Tristan et Iseut an identifiably creole cast? Is the Celtic braid on the cover of Roland really a “racialized colonial frame” (155)? Are metaphors and a chivalric code indeed enough to define a “creole medievalism?” Despite these sometimes questionable assertions, Warren has written an original, informative, and provocative book that offers fascinating insights into réunionnais...