This book is situated firmly in the study of romanticism rather than medieval studies. Readers of TMR will be interested in it chiefly because of its extensive interest in the way in which various medieval vernacular literatures came into prominence as the result of antiquarian scholarship in the course of the eighteenth century. Strabone's inquiry is directed chiefly towards the outcomes for romanticism but his research among the work of some of the less well known antiquarians of the period, particularly those in Wales and Scotland, will be of interest to both the romanticist and medievalist.
While the book ends up in some relatively familiar terrain, re-reading Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and Christabel, along the way it takes in some much less well known material. The second chapter, on the Scottish antiquarians Allan Ramsay and Thomas Ruddiman, is particularly fascinating. But overall, Strabone's book is exemplary in both calling for and then practicing a genuinely Archipelagic understanding of British poetics in the period. Rather than placing the usual English suspects centrally and making occasional reference outwards to the Celtic fringe, Strabone begins at the edges and slowly works back in, ultimately coming to England via Thomas Gray's understanding of the Welsh bardic tradition and the largely invented notion that Edward I had numerous Welsh bards put to death. He then proceeds to the influence on Coleridge of Thomas Percy and theReliques of Ancient English Poetry, proposing a new thesis on the metre of Christabel(which he links to Percy's account of alliterative verse, generally reckoned to be the first comprehensive account in English).
The book opens with an introduction which looks first at early modern efforts to retrieve medieval writing. It moves on to Dryden's understanding of Chaucer as the first medieval poet worth retrieval, and goes on to the later study of Old English. This is deftly done, though there is little here that is new and reference to existing studies is occasionally light (for example, no Allen Frantzen on the early modern study of Old English; one wonders if this is deliberate, however). Halfway into a longish introduction, there is a fresh start and the topic of "The Nation as an Imagined Cultural Community" (41) is examined. As can be guessed, an understanding of nationalism along the lines of Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities is proposed here, with due consideration of the arguments for and against much earlier forms of nationalism than Anderson (a "modernist" in this regard) allowed. Along the way Strabone refines his notion of what he calls "national relics": the term "refers to any printed work, authentic or otherwise, whose paratextual framing purports to present the volume's main contents as the archaic cultural origins of the modern nation, be they manuscripts, broadside ballads, transcribed oral songs, or outright fabrications" (65).
The introduction is being asked to do a lot of work and is very long. The problem with tackling such a topic as nationalism, even when largely restricted to the British Isles, is that it is impossible to do justice to the sheer breadth of material. Strabone does both too much and too little, where what was needed was something more compressed, gesturing to certain topics only in notes. To take a random example, we do not really need two paragraphs (as opposed to a footnote) on Momigliano's Classical Foundations of Modern Historiography (1990), when this work is never mentioned again. There are perhaps traces here of the book's origins in a doctoral thesis, and the classic literature review which embodies the (perfectly understandable) desire not to be bibliographically caught out.
At the same time there are strange omissions. For a book that avowedly focuses on the retrieval in eighteenth-century print of medieval manuscript material, it is odd that while several essays by Arthur Johnston are cited his still seminal 1964 work on the editing of medieval romance, Enchanted Ground, is not. Monica Santini's more recent The Impetus of Amateur Scholarship (2010) on the same topic is similarly absent, as are my own forays into the field. There is actually a plausible reason for all these omissions, which is that the book is more concerned with work emerging from the Celtic nations than from England. Nevertheless, to propose as Strabone does that "The Romantic appropriation of medieval poetry as it entered print circulation for the first time" is "an essential missing element in our theories of the rise of modern nationalism" (3) is not so generally true as he thinks.
Chapter 2 (the introduction is chapter 1) then proceeds to the cases of Allan Ramsay and Thomas Ruddiman, and the arresting contention that "histories of British Romanticism should begin" with the former figure. Ramsay was greatly influenced by the Bannatyne manuscript, the compilation of 1568 which contains a vast amount of what remains of Middle Scots verse, some of it uniquely. Strabone does close readings of the nature of Ramsay's editing, and also of the preface to his 1721 volume, Poems, which stands as a poetic manifesto. There is far less in this long chapter on Thomas Ruddiman, whose place in Scottish medieval studies derives chiefly from his edition of Gawin Douglas's version of the Aeneid, published in 1710.
Chapter 3 turns to Wales. Print did not take hold in Wales until well into the eighteenth century and it was not at first used to further medieval Welsh literature. This chapter charts the long and slow process whereby such early texts as Y Gododdin came to light, and examines the careers of such figures as Edward Lhuyd (d.1709), an associate of George Hickes, who furthered Welsh philology, and the eighteenth-century editor Evan Evans.
Chapter 4 makes the shift to English concerns, though not completely as its title suggests: "Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Other Bardic Poets: Thomas Chatterton, Edward Jones, Iolo Morganwg, and Odin." The argument here is that British Romanticism has been too taken up with the flourishing of English lyrical poetry. There is a split in criticism so that "one set of critics attends closely to the lyrical elements among the English Romantics while another set studies the bardic nationalism of the Scottish and Welsh Romantics..." They should instead, Strabone argues, be brought together.
Having attempted to do that in the fourth chapter, Strabone goes on to arguments about the impact on Coleridge of his understanding of medieval metrical forms, via the work of Thomas Percy in particular, in chapter 5, "Christabel and the Metre of 'our oldest Writers in the most barbarous ages'". This chapter is in some ways the most conventional in the book, involving as it does close readings of both Christabel and "Kubla Khan." But it builds on earlier work in the book. An eight-page epilogue then concludes the work.
To someone such as myself, outside the field of Romanticism, Strabone's overall claim for the reuniting of the lyrical and bardic strands seems persuasive (though it would need to be tested beyond the case of Coleridge, the chief representative of the canonical Romantic poets here). The archive on which he draws is a rich one and surely deserving of the wider audience he is trying to create for it. To a large extent this is a study of invented tradition, though it gestures to that body of critical work with a light touch. More explicitly, Strabone is interested in nationalism and especially cultural nationalism, which he sees as explaining much of the activity he charts.
Arguments here are vigorously pursued, but it seems to me that this also involves him in some blind spots. Everyone agrees that romantic nationalism was on the rise by the end of the eighteenth century. But were the Celtic varieties exactly comparable with the English? Strabone tends to lump them together. But in fact such English editors as Thomas Percy were very equivocal about the national value of the work they edited, preferring instead to highlight the interest of a barbarous state now safely long in the past.
In general, as a medievalist reader, I felt some more precise work would have been warranted. Strabone tends to refer to medieval vernacular languages and literatures as "archaic," a term which is not only vague but at worst, derogatory. Attempts at greater precision, as with one mention of something called "Old Celtic," do not convince. Elsewhere the apparent belief that Eduard Sievers has had the last word on the metre of Old English poetry suggests only a glancing acquaintance with the field.
It must be said that the book appears in a series entitled "Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Print." As a study of this kind, it can hardly be faulted: it is rich in detail and argument, and if there is much that could be disputed, that is all to the good. For those of us who regard medieval studies and Romanticism as naturally allied, it would have been good to have seen a little more explicit cross-conversation between the two fields.