-
Views
-
Cite
Cite
Jane Tolmie, David Lawton, Wendy Scase, and Rita Copeland (eds), New Medieval Literatures: Volume VI. Pp. viii + 317 + 9 black-and-white figures. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. £65.00 (ISBN 0 19 925251 3)., Notes and Queries, Volume 53, Issue 1, March 2006, Pages 125–127, https://doi.org/10.1093/notesj/gjj178
Close - Share Icon Share
Extract
ONCE again this series is characterized by a productive eclecticism, with, once again, rather too much emphasis on the newness of things. Volume VI consists of a brief introduction titled ‘Mapping Performance’, followed by eight essays in various areas of medieval studies, and finally one ‘analytical survey’ offering a review of scholarly work in the field of performance. David Lawton's introductory piece makes the claim that the volume aims to be ‘performative’ (1). Texts are treated as ‘social performances’ and the emphasis is on ‘antidisciplinarity and innovative writing’ (3, 9). Lawton's opening salvo offers an elegant series of snapshots of the individual texts to follow, but its various attempts to force a synthetic vision onto the volume are not all convincing or even necessary. Poised between journal and themed collection, this volume is not a united whole but instead a suggestive assembly of strong essays.
Daniel Birkholz offers a stimulating account of a map found in a sixteenth-century commonplace book in ‘The Vernacular Map: Re-Charting English Literary History’. This essay starts the volume off with a pleasing sense of love of history and raises a number of excellent questions about actual rather than figurative premodern ‘practices of mapping’ as well as reception studies – ‘the later lives of early maps’ (10, 29). Birkholz's essay juxtaposes cartography with other forms of textual production and thus moves the early English map into a larger frame of vernacular production.
