Emily Steiner's thesis is explicit in the title of her book. Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature contends that the literary emergence of Middle English must be examined in conjunction with the array of legal instruments that provided authoritative models, metaphors, and vocabularies for the inscription of this new vernacular. Between the years 1350 to 1420, she discerns the development of a "documentary poetics that enabled late medieval English writers to come to terms with their own literary endeavors and to describe the conditions of their own literary moment." This documentary poetics can be located at "the intersection between documentary culture and late medieval English literature," and is manifested in the "relationships between the institutional and the expressive, the material and the textual, the literate and the literary, and Latin and the vernacular" (10).
The book is divided into three sections, each of which contains two chapters. The first, and most abstruse, attempts to examine the affinity of legal and literary writings by relating thirteenth-century theories of documentary agency--namely those contained in the treatise De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae attributed to Henry de Bracton--to the creation of allegorical personae, often equipped with documents, in Guillaume de Deguileville's popular "pilgrimage" trilogy and its Middle English translations. Steiner's readings are suggestive, but it is not easy to follow her argument. Basically, she is pointing out that these texts exhibit a shared anxiety with respect to signification and representation, and that legal documents express this anxiety in very palpable forms, because "they embody a singular relation of material form to written text" (47). The second chapter is more legible, consisting of a brief overview of diplomatic and bureaucratic practices in late medieval England and their poetic transubstantiation in the fascinating Charters of Christ.
Yet the difficulty with both of these chapters, as with the book as a whole, is that Steiner's insistence on the special significance of legal documents does not inform her discussion of their impact on "all those seeing and hearing" them--or their fictive counterparts. So while she provides her readers with photographs of several manuscripts containing Charters of Christ, mentions their use of Eucharistic imagery and liturgical elements, and gestures toward "the performativity of genre" (84), she does not go beyond their appeal to "a diverse readership" (76); there is no consideration of their mimetic effect on a live audience used to the display and public reading of charters. This omission is odd, because Steiner herself is very careful--sometimes overly careful--to distinguish a documentary culture from a more broadly literary one: thus she sees marked differences between those pieces of parchment whose material forms determined and circumscribed their contents, and the many representations or references to codices, scrolls, and other written artifacts. But she never seriously considers how our understanding of Middle English literature should be transformed if we accept her thesis and learn to think of that literature as very dependant on texts that were remarkable because they were designed to be instantly recognizable in performance, texts whose functions and forms were so standardized by the late fourteenth century that they could be readily differentiated from one another, and from other types of texts--even by people who could not read the writing on them.
This strange avoidance of the visual and aural aspects of real or imagined documents, in a study which insists on the importance of materiality, is puzzling. In the next two chapters, both of which deal with the deployment of legal instruments in Piers Plowman and its literary successors, forthright consideration of how audiences and readers might at the very least have envisioned the performance of these embedded texts seems called for at every turn, but such considerations are constantly deferred or marginalized, to the detriment of the overall argument. In the third chapter, for example, Steiner will reveal-- perceptively, and in contrast to prevailing criticism--that the tearing of Truth's Pardon is an affirmative act, not a destructive one. In order to do this, she embarks on an extended discussion of the chirograph, since her intention (one sees, with the aid of hindsight) is to show that the Pardon would have been understood by Langland's audience as a bond made in the form of a chirograph, otherwise known as an indenture, and that the "breaking" of this document, like the Fraction of the Host, symbolizes the contract of Salvation between God and Mankind, inscribed on the charter of Christ's body: the Word made Flesh, indeed. This is excellent; but in a chapter of exactly fifty pages, the most important aspect of the chirograph is ignored until forty-eight pages have elapsed, namely its physical form, the fact that it is a piece of parchment on which an agreement is inscribed in duplicate so that, after tearing or cutting, both parties could literally keep their faith.
In the next chapter, as in the two chapters devoted to the use of documentary forms in the promotion and suppression of Lollardy, Steiner alerts us to the importance of "public writing," preaching, and the "performative work" of texts, but readers eager for an extended treatment of these topics will prick up their ears in vain. That being said, those who do not share this reviewer's preoccupations and frustrations will find some insightful treatments of canonical and non-canonical texts, including the Hereford Mappa mundi and the Book of Margery Kempe, featured respectively in the introduction and epilogue. Yet readers should not expect to find any but the most passing of references to the contemporary works of Chaucer, or to the later corpus of medieval English drama.
Steiner's Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature joins the ranks of a number of historicist studies indebted to the pioneering practicality of M. T. Clanchy's From Memory to Written Record and the more theoretical frameworks of Brian Stock. But in contrast to recent reconsiderations of the relationship between orality and textuality in other pre-modern European literatures (one thinks of Paul Zumthor, Bernard Cerquiglini, Gregory Nagy, Paul Saenger, Sylvia Huot), it does not complicate an anachronistic idea of the "writer" or "author." And unlike Steven Justice and Joyce Coleman, Steiner does not pay attention to the ways that texts were actively inscribed, circulated, voiced, enacted, and negotiated in real public situations. The summary of the book's contents printed on its jacket and flyleaf promises that she will discuss "the conditions of textual production" and "the ritual performance of legal documents," and she certainly alludes to such matters. But they are not central to her project. For Steiner, "to perform," "to dramatize," or "to display" are figures of speech, literary constructs. Likewise, the verbs "to publish" or "to make public" retain their modern flavor. One has the sense of being chained to the desk along with the medieval book or (more aptly) kept in a muniment chest or confined in a glass case. We are not out in the open air, watching a notary copy a charter, hearing a proclamation read aloud and seeing the royal official display his letters patent hung with brightly-colored seals, or witnessing the forging of a bond through the ceremonious fracture of a chirograph. Nor are we invited to imagine the performative context in which a Charter of Christ might have been similarly read and displayed. Perhaps this is intentional. Perhaps Steiner is suggesting that what "makes" medieval English literature is precisely an hermetic insistence on writing, an exclusive reference to the reader, and an immersion in the world created by the text itself.