Religions Reviewed

Brian Stock’s Writing and Rebellion provides, from among the three, the most direct engagement with the ideas recounted in Spiegel’s essays. Spiegel laments the absence of a fixed historical materiality from cultural history and New Historicism, and she points to Marxist history as a lonely custodian of the concept of an objective, non-textual past.[1] Stock, for his part, is in large measure attempting the sort of “history from below” that originated among Marxist historians.[2] He notes that his work may be considered to “mingle political interests conventionally thought leftist with scholarly interests conventionally thought conservative.”[3]

In the introduction to Writing and Rebellion, Stock takes issue directly with a claim made by Spiegel in The Past as Text. He is replying to her distinction between “[l]iterary text and historical context,” in which she describes the former as “given” and the latter as “constructed.”[4] In response, he declares in no uncertain terms the constructed quality of literary texts—particularly medieval texts, for which readers are dependent on the work of paleography, codicology, philology and other related “materialist disciplines.”[5] As Mary Carruthers points out, a text is not the same thing as a document.[6] A (literary) document is only the tangible result of an attempt to transmit and preserve the text for which it is a complex and fallible vehicle. So Justice rejects Spiegel’s manner of discriminating between text and context. But the way he does it suggests that all texts are actually contexts, rather than vice versa.  And they are, aren’t they?

In fact, the central point of departure for Writing and Rebellion might be seen as a response to and an advance beyond Spiegel’s methodological remarks on the evidentiary value of medieval chronicles. In at least three of the articles in The Past as Text, she sets forth solutions for overcoming the apparent uselessness of old medieval records that sometimes present fantastic and incredible events as factual narrative. She proposed that the chronicles should be used primarily to establish features of their authorial subjectivities: political ambitions, ideological positions, and propagandistic endeavors.[7] Such an approach certainly manifests the literary-critical dimension of the “linguistic turn.” Justice instead begins his discussion with an apparently small and subtle “mistake” in the Chronicon Henrici Knighton, which leads him into considerations of its subject matter (the peasant revolt) that he maintains would have been impossible for the chronicler Knighton, who “could not understand them well enough to efface them.”[8]
In his epilogue, Justice neatly sets out the methodological alternatives. He writes that the historian may “credit the chronicles…and take their accounts roughly at face value, making adjustments to account for discrepancies between them and the quality of their information.”[9] This method is the older one that Spiegel calls “not a particularly propitious approach.”[10] Next, he points out the option to “refuse to credit the sources altogether, decide that they are so deeply compromised that we can learn from them only their own purposes and ideologies.”[11] Here he seems to be summing Spiegel’s method. Finally, he offers his preference, to “begin from those texts that are, without question, distorted by interest and ideology, and…begin from the distortions themselves.”[12] He elsewhere disclaims any fully-fledged methodological status for this imperative, but it does appear to bear a resemblance to certain deconstructionist ideas.[13]

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[1] Spiegel, The Past as Text, pp. 16-18.

[2] Justice, Writing and Rebellion, pp. 5, 7, 10. Also of interest in this connection is Justice’s appraisal of the significance of agrarian seasonal festivals, on pp. 155-60, as a tacit development of or reply to E.P. Thompson, “Patrician Society, Plebian Culture,” Journal of Social History 7:4 (1974).

[3] Justice, Writing and Rebellion, p. 4.

[4] Stock cites the article as published in Speculum, but the statement in question can be found in Spiegel, The Past as Text, pp. 21-2.

[5] Stock, Writing and Rebellion, pp. 6-7 (author’s emphasis). In this connection, see the provocative essay by Derek Persall, “Editing Medieval Texts” in Textual Criticism and Literary Interpretation, edited by Jerome McGann (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985) pp. 92-106.

[6] Carruthers, The Book of Memory, p. 12.

[7] Op. cit, Chapters 5, 6 & 10, pp. 83-110, 178-94.

[8] Justice, Writing and Rebellion, pp. 16, 260-1.

[9] Op. cit., p. 256.

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

[11] Justice, Writing and Rebellion, p. 256.

[12] Op. cit., p. 256.

[13] Op. cit., p. 9.