Religions Reviewed

Spiegel remarks a poststructuralist view of language “as constituting impersonal codes governing individual expression.”[1] On this count, it is worth noting that she seems to have confused the concept of “code” at issue. A “code” that is “governing” is certainly a matter of “a form of codification,” in the words that Spiegel quotes from Raymond Williams.[2] But Spiegel confuses codification with encryption, when she later claims that “poststructuralist theory on discursive ‘codes,’ ironically, implies the existence of the same messages ‘in clear.’”[3] It does not. The concept of discursive codes or regimens of language, however, is evident in all three of the books here. Stock writes, “literacy created a set of lexical and syntactical structures which made the persona of the speaker largely irrelevant.”[4] Carruthers in her turn points to the medieval trained memory as a “cultural modality,” fundamental to and formative of the intellectual and moral values of the period.[5] And Justice proposes that the importance of William Langland’s Piers Plowman to the English insurgents was that to provide a conceptual language in the vernacular that permitted them to communicate their own grievances (as distinct from Langland’s positions) in a way that they had lacked the necessary “code” to do previously.[6]

A feature of the “impersonal codes” that seems to distress Spiegel is the elision of “a centered, speaking subject.”[7]  These historians never adopt such an extreme view. Carruthers comes closest, when she suggests in The Book of Memory that the priority of memory in medieval thought created for the individual a sense of selfhood, or more properly “character,” that was consciously assembled from “bits and pieces of great authors of the past.”[8] But she does not deny the existence of medieval individuals, or their capacity for uniquely characteristic expression. Writing and Rebellion overtly emphasizes the unique and socially-situated voices and motives of the various writers to whom Justice credits the primary texts on which he draws: chroniclers Henry Knighton and Thomas Walsingham, poets Geoffery Chaucer and John Gower, and particularly rebel priest John Ball and whatever other unnamed rebels may have contributed to the pseudonymous broadsides of the uprising. Stock presents a variety of authors, and points out, for example, how Peter Abelard and Bernard of Clairveaux were able to formulate radically different positions within a shared textual culture.[9]

One solution that Spiegel proposes in the face of the theoretical uncertainty she discusses, is for literary historians to explore the interaction of discursivity and materiality in “the moment of inscription.”[10] Both The Implications of Literacy and The Book of Memory dedicate significant passages to characterizing the processes of literate composition in the Middle Ages.[11] Spiegel believes that attention to the “moment of choice, decision and action that creates the social reality of the text” will help to reveal and distinguish generative factors both internal and external to the author.[12] But the pictures presented by Stock and Carruthers, while enriching our understanding of medieval intellectual perspectives, multiply and diffuse any such “moment of inscription.” Anselm of Canterbury, who serves as an example for both historians, seems to have had no critically formative point in his work of textual composition. A text that initially precipitated out of casual conversation continued to develop in a dialogical manner, and never reached a final form![13] Justice, on the other hand, might be thought to be following Spiegel’s advice, particularly in his fifth chapter (which he himself plays down as fashionably “suspicious” literary history).[14]

[1] Spiegel, The Past as Text, pp. 6, 13.

[2] Op. cit., p. 6.

[3] Op. cit., p. 19.

[4] Stock, The Implications of Literacy, p. 86.

[5] Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 259-60.

[6] Justice, Writing and Rebellion, pp. 137-8.

[7] Spiegel, The Past as Text, p. 6.

[8] Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 180.

[9] Stock, The Implications of Literacy, p. 407.

[10] Spiegel, The Past as Text, p. 25.

[11] Stock, The Implications of Literacy, pp. 331-351. Carruthers, The Book of Memory, pp. 194-206.

[12] Spiegel, The Past as Text, p. 26.

[13] Carruthers, The Book of Memory, pp. 213.

[14] Justice, Writing and Rebellion, pp. 4-5, 195-251.