FICTION AND INCARNATION: RHETORIC, THEOLOGY, AND LITERATURE IN THE MIDDLE AGES/THE PERFORMANCE OF SELF: RITUAL, CLOTHING, AND IDENTITY DURING THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR

Comparative Literature, Summer 2004 by Lerer, Seth

FICTION AND INCARNATION: RHETORIC, THEOLOGY, AND LITERATURE IN THE MIDDLE ACES. By Alexandre Leupin. Translated by David Laatsch. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. xxiv, 256 p.

THE PERFORMANCE OF SELE: RITUAL, CLOTHING, AND IDENTITY DURING THE HUNDRED YEARS WAR. By Susan Crane. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. 269 p.

"So what is this phenomenon that we call the Middle Ages?" So asks Alexandre Leupin at the beginning of his Fiction and Incarnation, the newly published translation of his Fiction et incarnation, which appeared in French in 1993. His answers are in keeping with the intellectual inheritance of this work: its idiom, its age, its audience. Leupin is best known in North America for his Barbarolexis: Medieval Literature and Sexuality, a work that appeared in English translation in 1989 and that was part of a broad and highly influential turn in Romance medieval studies towards the linguistic theorizing of the literary body. The fascination with that body and its sexual and social transgressions was read, largely, not so much as a problem in the history of religion or of institutional life (as the work of James Brundage, say, had done), but as a moment in the history of tropes. Sexuality became a form of discourse; personal transgression could be seen as something akin to grammatical solecism. Working from philosophers such as Alain de Lille, grammarians such as Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and a range of medieval vernacular romances, Leupin (along with other, more familiar critics such as Eugene Vance, Howard Bloch, and Stephen Nichols) sought a Middle Ages, as he restates the position in Faction and Incarnation, as "the golden age of reflexivity" (p. xx). Developing this argument, Leupin sees that reflexivity as invested with meaning by the fact of Christ's incarnation. "The virgin birth is a sign for the birth of a radically other culture. The Incarnation, in retaining its status as a mystery, lends the weight of the Real to literature" (p. xxi).

One would therefore expect Fiction and Incarnation to develop a theory of medieval literature keyed to an incarnational sacrality. Such an approach has informed a more recent sway in medieval literary studies toward an emphasis on theological debate: the palpability of Christ's body (as in the provocative work on medieval drama by Sarah Beckwith), the question of eucharistie substance and ritual (as in the polemical debates between David Aers and Eammon Duffy), the status of vernacular language's ability to convey revealed truth (as in the field-defining researches of Nicholas Watson)-all this, and more, has helped transform medieval literary study into a discipline centering on theological inquiry.

But Leupin's book has none of this material. As a work now ten years old (and barely updated bibliographically), it still resides in a critical environment of high French literary theory. For all its gestures toward religious history, Fiction and Incarnation is a story of rhetoric, an account of figurative language from Cicero to the French fourteenth century. Readings of classical rhetorical works are pressed into the service of an argument for a kind of "epistemological break" in the Christian tradition. Tertullian and Augustine, in Leupin's account, transformed the inheritance of Ciceronian rhetoric into an art of preaching, a technique of reading scripture, and a theory of signification.

Most of Leupin's material, and many of his arguments, will be familiar to students and scholars of this history, and his epigrammatic simplifications (though not without rhetorical flourish) mask many of the subtleties that texture the one-thousand-year history he limns. Anyone, for example, who comes to Augustine through the researches of Peter Brown, Brian Stock, and JJ. O'Donnell will be impatient with the off-hand treatment of the early books of the Confessions here. What can Leupin mean when he avers, parenthetically, in a discussion of the young Augustine that his father, Patricius, is "well named" (p. 54)? Certainly, there is more to this appellation than mere irony-and certainly, whatever irony there is may be enhanced by the fact, missed by Leupin, that Patricius is unnamed at this moment in the Confessions: indeed, he is hardly named at all.' Or, in the treatment of Isidore's Etymologiae, how can any scholar of early medieval culture engage constructively with statements such as these?

The encyclopedia is a third term between fiction and creation. Il thus receives a dignity that is only one step below that of the one true plasmator. By juxtaposing and harmonizing, the encyclopedia invents the myth of a unified human culture. Its act is a repetition of the model of Genesis, to which it is related by analogy. Nothing more was needed to make the Etymologies the birth of "medieval" culture, (p. 108)

Compared to the richness and historical detail of Bruce Holsinger's recent and awardwinning Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture, Leupin's readings are superficial. And for anyone familiar with the detailed intensity of Peter Godman's studies of Carolingian literary culture, the following statement of Leupin's could only be appropriate for the freshman survey: "The great barbarian invasions from the east destroyed the highways of Roman/Christian symbolism. This destruction might have been a deliberate strategic objective of the eastern conquerors" (with a footnote to books by Lucien Musset and Pierre Courcelle, both originally published 40 years ago; pp. 110, 235n.2). And finally, for any student who has followed criticism of twelfth-century philosophical poetry and medieval French Romance or Lyric (fromjan Ziolkowski through Sylvia Huot), this book's final chapters on Alain de Lille, the Roman de Renart, and Guillaume de Machaut will seem exercises in mere paraphrase.