Catherine A. M. Clarke, Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 . Catherine A. M. Clarke . Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006. Pp. xi+160.
2011; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 108; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1086/658281
ISSN1545-6951
Autores Tópico(s)Medieval Literature and History
ResumoPrevious articleNext article FreeBook ReviewCatherine A. M. Clarke, Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400 Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400. Catherine A. M. Clarke . Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2006. Pp. xi+160.Peter LarkinPeter LarkinBelmont Abbey College Search for more articles by this author Belmont Abbey CollegePDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreThe relation between place and identity has long been a fertile subject. Classical environmental theory, for example, held that geography and climate influenced the complexion and, hence, the nature of a people. In Literary Landscapes and the Idea of England, 700–1400, Catherine Clarke offers a related thesis: that descriptions of place influence identity. Analyzing landscape descriptions, she contends that writers from Bede to Gower adapted locus amoenus and pastoral topoi to the rhetoric of nationhood. By articulating geographic ideals and adapting literary traditions, these writers developed a vision of “England” that, Clarke suggests, influenced early modern representations. In 160 pages (including bibliography and index), this study examines a diverse set of Latin and vernacular texts that span seven centuries, a brevity achieved in part from a narrow focus on landscapes “associated with ideological formulations of English space and identity” (2). This brevity comes at a cost. Clarke covers much ground, but the dense contexts that underlie her arguments are not always adequately developed.Her introduction deftly examines several background issues—early modern conceptualizations of England as an island paradise, for instance— but discussion of the locus amoenus topos is brief: it consists, for the most part, in the expansion of Ernst Curtius's formulation (2).1 The issue, though, is not the definition of the topos but the lack of discussion of its evolution from classical to medieval times. The conflation of the locus amoenus with earthly and celestial versions of paradise, for example, bears mentioning. Her treatment of national identity in a medieval context is also brief. Acknowledging the subject's vexed status, Clarke notes Benedict Anderson's argument that nationalism could not occur before the eighteenth century.2 She responds by citing scholarship that locates nationalism's origins within Bede's era and by positioning her study as an exploration, not of the nation's construction, but of different perceptions of England.3 Reticent with regard to ethnicity, she offers “basic formulations of national identity based upon territory and topography” (4). Put simply, the island's bounds produce the nation.In the first chapter, “The Edenic Island,” Clarke contends that the geographical prologue to Bede's Ecclesiastical History (ca. 731) describes Britain as a locus amoenus and that this description remains integral to the ideology of the History as a whole.4 As her central arguments imply, she views Bede's ideology in secular, ethnocentric terms: “Just as the image of the Edenic island symbolizes the privileged heritage of the English people, so Bede's appropriation of literary models in the prologue—historical, biblical, rhetorical—asserts an English cultural heritage and tradition” (21). Unfortunately, her delineation of the literary context of these arguments and their general frame—Bede's purpose in writing the History —is limited. Since her subject is locus amoenus imagery in a geographic description of an “Edenic” Britain, one written by an exegetical scholar, it is curious that she omits discussion of the influence of exegesis on geographic traditions concerned with paradise. After Augustine described the terrestrial Eden as “the most delightful place,” Christian poets used the locus amoenus topos to describe paradise, and so arose a literary convention—the association of the topos and paradise—that Isidore of Seville adapted for use in geographic description.5 As a result, exegetically influenced encomia of place—for example, Bede's geographical prologue—incorporate the iconography of paradise, namely, the motifs of the locus amoenus. Although Clarke acknowledges biblical influence and comments on allusions to paradise (9), she never explicitly discusses these Christian rhetorical traditions or the more general interpretation of Bede's work in terms of salvation history. Her claim that the description of the island's fertility renegotiates the classical locus amoenus may have carried more weight had she addressed not only these geographical traditions but also the argument that this fertility, in imitation of the copia of Genesis, signifies “the abundant harvest which is the fruit of the waters of baptism.”6In large part, Clarke supports her claim that Bede's literary adaptations assert an English heritage by comparing his prologue to one its sources, Gildas's geographic introduction to The Ruin of Britain (ca. 540).7 She asserts that the locus amoenus functions differently in each prologue: Gildas uses the topos to represent loss and reproach, while Bede's delightful landscape connotes pleasure and possibility. By representing the island as bride, for example, Gildas foregrounds “the idea of a virgin, unspoilt land, and anticipates the text's wider narrative of possession, rape and ruin” (15). While Clarke rightly observes that this bridal imagery suggests the land's betrothal to the Britons, her conclusion that Bede's abandonment of the metaphor frees “the locus amoenus from the negative implications of Gildas's representation” is not convincing (15). In Gildas and in Bede, the locus amoenus itself alludes both to paradise and to the Fall, so it is more likely that the topos anticipates disaster rather than the epithalamial imagery, which is a convention of encomia of place.8 Bede may have discarded the metaphor to avoid connecting Britain to the English or to any people. These issues detract from the argument that the topos functions differently in each prologue, and they weaken Clarke's more general conclusions: that Bede reshapes the topos, remakes its meaning and politics, and, in doing so, asserts an English heritage (21).In examining the History's account of St. Alban's execution, Bede's prose Life of St. Cuthbert (ca. 721), and Felix's Latin prose Life of St. Guthlac (ca. 730–40), Clarke's analysis reconfigures traditional religious associations. She argues, for example, that the transformed landscape of “Alban's martyrdom allows the recovery, if only for a moment, of the paradisal locus amoenus as described at the beginning of the History —an enactment of the heavenly on earth and of the ideal Britannia” (26). This argument alters the traditional view of the martyrdom as an imitation of the Acts of the Apostles.9 Instead of seeing the miracle of the changed land as the sanctification of British soil in the unfolding of salvation history, Clarke emphasizes the momentary transformation of British land in imitation of Bede, a bold shift that may have gained clarity by reference to the traditional view. Finally, in a claim that merits development, Clarke argues that “Alban's story is a metonym for national destiny” because the site of his martyrdom is island-like and his name approximates “Albion” (26). Here, in this Latin hagiographic text and elsewhere in her study, Clarke asserts that a classical topos with Christian associations participates in the medieval production of national identity. It is regrettable, then, that she does not question Anderson's criteria for the emergence of nationalism, one of which is the withering of sacred languages.10In the second chapter, Clarke challenges two widely held views: that Old English poetry invariably presented nature as grim and hostile and that its landscapes expressed a native tradition free from other cultural influences. Her analysis focuses on two poems from the Exeter Book. The first, The Phoenix (ca. 950), has a Latin source: De ave phoenice, a 170-line allegorical poem tentatively ascribed to Lactantius.11 Among other points, Clarke asserts that The Phoenix's opening description of a paradise-like island integrates “Latin and Anglo-Saxon features into the shaping of an English locus amoenus” (43–44). Unfortunately, her claims are difficult to evaluate because she does not provide for comparison the corresponding passages from the Latin source. Among several arguments concerning Guthlac A (ca. 750–950), also from the Exeter Book, Clarke suggests that the “return to the beorg ” passage expresses both Antonine and insular hagiographic traditions, but support for this claim is uneven.12 While she cites several studies of Antonine elements in the work, she derives the conventions of insular hagiography from her analysis of a limited number of vitae (49–51). Given the universality of the locus amoenus in religious discourse, a fuller presentation is needed to bolster her thesis that the wilderness/order dialectic expressed by insular texts provides “the basis for a powerful ideology of English potential” (50–51). Citing locus amoenus imagery and allusions to patronage, Clarke also argues that the “return to the beorg ” passage expresses the conventions of medieval Latin panegyric (52–57). But the pervasiveness of the topos, not to mention the centrality of patronage to the development of sainthood in both Roman and Germanic cultures, make this a difficult argument. The conclusion of this chapter links The Phoenix and Guthlac A to the tenth-century Benedictine Reforms. Again, the wide use of the topos in Christian culture complicates two claims: first, that the audience for these poems would have understood their use of the locus amoenus as “integral to the rhetoric and ideology of the Benedictine Reforms” and, second, that the use of the topos constituted a “rhetoric of Englishness” (61).In “Landscapes as Mirrors for England,” Clarke examines texts affiliated with the monastic houses of Glastonbury, Ely, and Ramsey. She argues that these regional houses, located far from the center of post-Conquest power, reasserted their national role by adapting landscape description “to the fashioning of monastic identity and its connection to images of the nation” (67–68). Her argument that landscapes figure in the representation of monastic identity is well supported and convincing (69). Less persuasive is her effort to link these descriptions to the nation. For example, she quotes a passage from a Latin life of St. Dunstan (ca. 1000) that describes Glastonbury as a fertile royal island situated within King Æthelstan's realm.13 This passage recalls Bede's Edenic description of Britain, she asserts, because it represents Glastonbury as an island locus amoenus and because it refers to the English kingdom; thus, Glastonbury and nation (through Bede) are linked as island loci amoeni (69). By similar reasoning, descriptions of these monastic sites, all islands, “assert a status emblematic of the nation as a whole” (68). But Dunstan's vita and Bede's description both exhibit conventions of geographic prologues and encomia of place, so their direct connection may be slight.In the fourth chapter's discussion of Anglo-Latin writing about cities, Clarke provides a fine introduction to the flourishing of medieval urban encomia before turning to her main subject, a comparison of twelfth- and fourteenth-century representations of urban space. Stressing enclosure, she argues that the ideal English city is represented as “an enclosed pastoral locus amoenus” (90). Through close reading, she makes a persuasive case that two late twelfth-century texts—William Fitz Stephen's Descriptio Londoniae and Lucian's De laude Cestrie—represent urban space confidently: London becomes “inheritor of the glories of the classical world”; Chester, “a mirror for Rome” (105).14 For Clarke, these texts also express a latent tension that arises from their permeable and unstable boundaries. Fitz Stephen describes not only the city but also its suburbs, and Lucian contemplates both Chester and neighboring Wales. This permeability challenges the enclosure that is fundamental to Clarke's conception of urban encomia and prompts her, for example, to offer several reasons why Fitz Stephen displaces so much his praise of London onto the pastoral suburbs: London's sprawl required “a new version of the ideal city”; the writer lacked a vocabulary to describe urban space (95). Indeed, these porous borders may reflect an undue emphasis on enclosure: praise of walls and defenses is but one of many topics that characterize urban encomia.In addition, this chapter examines texts from the late fourteenth century, including book 1 of John Gower's Vox clamantis and Richard Maidstone's Concordia.15 Clarke discusses these texts' representations of London within the framework of pastoral and panegyric conventions, which, “verging on cliché and bankruptcy,” serve to render urban space not as coherent but as contested and ambivalent (129). For these texts, the model of the city as enclosed locus amoenus may be less productive than Sylvia Frederico's recent formulation. She suggests that the Desciptio and book 1 of Vox clamantis represent the city as an eroticized, and sometimes violated woman.16Clarke's epilogue neatly concludes her study where it began: with John of Gaunt's iconic representation of England from Richard II (1615). As she notes, Gaunt quickly subverts his depiction of the nation as locus amoenus —“This other Eden, demi-paradise”—with his remark that England “hath made a shameful conquest of itself.”17 Clarke ably discusses medieval precedents for such corruption from within. These include Gloucestor's Metrical Chronicle (ca. 1300) and Layamon's Brut (ca. 1185–1215).18 From this example and others, she convincingly provides medieval analogues for elements that became prominent in the early modern rhetoric of nation. While earlier literary traditions influence later discourses of nation—a point Clarke makes quite well—it is not always clear that her medieval examples express the idea of England. At times anachronistic, her model of nation by topography is not always convincing. Her claims that insular writers adapted literary conventions to produce English traditions do not always account for the universality of the conventions of Christian discourse. These issues, together with the study's enormous temporal and generic range, complicate her efforts to establish a medieval English tradition of the locus amoenus that serves a national rather than a religious purpose. Notes 1 Ernst Curtius, European Literature in the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton University Press, 1973), 195.2 Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983), 17–40.3 Adrian Hastings, The Construction of Nationhood: Ethnicity, Religion and Nationalism (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 26–39.4 Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People, ed. Bertram Colgrave and R. A. B. Mynors (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969), 14–21.5 Natalia Lozovsky, “The Earth Is Our Book”: Geographical Knowledge in the Latin West, ca. 400 – 1000 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 52–53.6 Calvin Kendall, “Imitation and the Venerable Bede's Ecclesiastical History,” in Saints, Scholars and Heroes: Studies in Medieval Culture in Honour of Charles W. Jones, ed. Margot King and Wesley Stevens, 2 vols. (Collegeville, MN: Hill Monastic Library, 1979), 1:180–81.7 Gildas: The Ruin of Britain and Other Works, ed. and trans. Michael Winterbottom (Chichester: Phillimore, 1978), 16–17, 89–90.8 A. H. Merrills, History and Geography in Late Antiquity (Cambridge University Press, 2005), 205–20.9 Kendall, “Imitation,” 174.10 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 24.11 [Lactantius], De ave phoenice, in Minor Latin Poets, trans. J. Wright Duff and Arnold Duff, Loeb Classical Editions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), 650–64.12 Felix, Guthlac A, lines 732–48, in The Exeter Anthology of Old English Poetry: An Edition of Exeter, Dean and Chapter MS 3501, vol. 1, ed. Bernard J. Muir (University of Exeter Press, 1994).13 “Vita Sancti Dunstani, Auctore B,” in Memorials of Saint Dunstan, ed. William Stubbs, Rolls Series 63 (London: Longman, 1874), 6–7.14 William Fitz Stephen, “Descriptio nobilissimæ civitatis Londoniæ,” in Materials for the History of Thomas Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, vol. 3, Vita Sancti Thomæ, Cantuariensis archiepiscopi et martyris, auctore Willelmo filio Stephani, ed. J. C. Robertson, Rolls Series 67 (London: Longman, 1877), 2–13. F. M. Stenton, “Norman London: An Essay by Professor F. M. Stenton with a Translation of William Fitz Stephen's ‘Description’ by Professor H. E. Butler, M. A.,” Historical Association Leaflets, nos. 93–94 (London, 1934). Butler's translation of Fitz Stephen's “Description” appears in a reprint that combines the two leaflets: William Fitz Stephen and F. M. Stenton, Norman London (1934; repr., New York: Italica, 1990), 48–67. Liber Luciani de laude Cestrie, ed. M. V. Taylor, Lancashire and Chester Record Society 64 (Edinburgh: Record Society, 1912).15 John Gower, Vox clamantis, in The Complete Works of John Gower: The Latin Works, ed. G. C. Macaulay (Oxford: Clarendon, 1902), 3–313; Richard Maidstone, Concordia: The Reconciliation of Richard II with London, ed. David R. Carlson and trans. A. G. Rigg (Kalamazoo, MI: Medieval Institute Publications, 2003).16 Sylvia Federico, New Troy: Fantasies of Empire in the Late Middle Ages, Medieval Cultures 36 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 1–28.17 William Shakespeare, King Richard II, ed. Andrew Gurr (Cambridge University Press, 1990), 2.1.42 and 2.1.66.18 The Metrical Chronicle of Robert of Gloucester, ed. W. A. Wright, Rolls Series 86 (London: Longman, 1887); Layamon, Brut, or Hystoria Brutonum, ed. and trans. W. R. J. Barron and S.C. Weinberg (Harlow: Longman, 1995). Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 108, Number 3February 2011 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/658281 Views: 147Total views on this site © 2011 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved. For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.
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