"Pagans are good to think with," claims Sarah Salih in the Introduction to Imagining the Pagan in Late Medieval England (4). While Salih is not the first scholar to adapt Claude Lévi-Strauss's famous phrase, "animals are good to think with," she does so to remarkably good effect. Unlike religious "others" like Jews and Muslims, who actually existed in the late-medieval world, pagans were "pure thought experiment" (19). In further contrast with Jews and Muslims, pagans were believed to lack any common beliefs with Christians: more "other" than other non-Christian others, "[p]agans start from a position of difference" (19). Physical absence and religious difference, argues Salih, translate to "cultural usefulness," as medieval Christians narrated pagans to address a range of questions (20). Of most interest to Salih is the applicability of pagans to questions we today associate with the social sciences: "How do people construct, and how are they constructed by, their civilisations, habitations, religions, artefacts and pasts?" (27). Salih's deeply thoughtful, virtuosically wide-ranging study demonstrates how meticulous attention to a single topos in a particular time and place provides the means to unravel so many aspects of late medieval English culture.
To pursue her interest in pagans and "questions of the social sciences" (19), Salih centers her study on two material manifestations of pagan antiquity, the city and the idol. While Christians refurbished and reoccupied pagan cities, they rejected and destroyed pagan idols. Pagan cities and idols, real or imagined, facilitated Christian thinking about cross-cultural and human-object relationships. Through the pagan, these relationships converge: in medieval traditions, pagan cultural difference manifests as "a disordered relation with the material artifact" (11). This observation, that pagans' objects render them other, directs Salih's methodology, which draws from both postcolonial theory and new materialist philosophy, particularly the work of Bruno Latour. Observation and methodology allow Salih to build on previous scholarship, in which medieval Christendom's "othering" of pagans has been noted, but less so the centrality of materialism to the othering process.
Another point of distinction in favor of Salih's study is her focus on fifteenth century England, and authors such as John Lydgate, John Capgrave, and Osbern Bokenham, as opposed to the fourteenth century, which, with its usual suspects of Chaucer, Gower, and the Gawain Poet, has long anchored scholarship on the medieval English reception of pagan antiquity. Salih selects primary texts of "quasi-factual, or ostensibly factual genres," such as hagiography, travelogues, and legendary history (6). Making good on her interest in material culture, especially the interplay between pagan and medieval materialisms, Salih examines both textual accounts of things and actual things (manuscripts, tapestries, seals) that survive into the present from the medieval past.
Salih's richly synthetic thinking is on display in her decision to organize chapters conceptually rather than by text. Imagining the Pagan consists of three chapters titled "Origins," "Encounters," and "The Present." Taken together, these chapters constitute what Salih provocatively calls "a pseudo-history of paganity," that is, an imaginative chronological account from medieval Christian perspectives of both the rise of paganity and its continuation after its alleged fall (31). Salih's structure allows her effectively to move back and forth between concepts and texts, and the book as a whole is remarkably lucid, its clarity aided by the fact that each chapter begins with a short abstract and is divided into clearly titled sections. (In the chapter summaries that follow, section titles are indicated either in the body of the text or in parentheses.)
Chapter 1, "Origins: Building Cities, Making Idols," shifts from the legendary pagan origins of medieval kingdoms to the legendary origins of paganity itself in the fabrication of the first idols. The chapter contains five sections, beginning with the city ("Troy"), followed by three sections on idols ("Idol theory," "Idol histories," "Idol bodies"), and concluding with a synthesis of the chapter's key concepts by way of the Trojan hero Hector's legendary tomb ("A quasi-idol"). Lydgate's Troy Book is the touchstone text of chapter 1, its expansive scope allowing Salih to interweave close readings of the rise and fall of Troy as preeminent pagan city, and Hector's tomb as an imaginative structure through which pagan achievement is preserved and passed on to Christians. Pecock and Cagrave also come up for consideration, as does material culture in an arresting close reading of a Burgudian tapestry. Much of the chapter, though, extends the theorization of idols first presented in the Introduction; it is devoted to Christians thinking about pagans thinking about idols. As the other against whom the Christian self is constructed, pagans are imagined to be deluded and naïve, unaware that their idols are, at best, inert matter, and at worst, demonic animations. Salih complicates the Christian dismissal of idolatry by reexamining questions of agency and vitality. Adopting new materialist theory, Salih considers how the idol, as thing itself, might both possess agency and catalyze the agency of human worshippers and demon residents.
Chapter 2, "Encounters: The City Converted, the Fallen Idols," continues Salih's examination of cities and idols as material manifestations of paganity, but shifts focus to representations of Christian-pagan encounters. These imaginative encounters take place in the early days of Christianity and in the genre of hagiography. Works under consideration include Bokenham's and Capgrave's St Katherinelegends, Lydgate's Life of St Edmund, and Alexander Barclay's Life of St George. In the first section, "The City Converted," Salih argues that the cities and idols of hagiography alternatively facilitate narratives of continuity and rupture and thus play complementary historiographic roles. Salih convincingly claims that the main subject of hagiographic conversion is in fact the city: while pagan individuals convert instantaneously, their cities provide opportunities for more extended, complex thinking about the conversion process. After identifying this pattern in hagiography Salih also demonstrates how one English exemplar breaks it. In a fine close reading of Lydgate's St Edmund in British Library MS Harley 2278, Salih identifies a non-urban construction of Viking paganity that contrasts with the more usual Mediterranean pagans of the hagiographic convention and therefore invites comparison between them. In the next section, "Pagan Positions," Salih argues that the historiographic thinking embedded in hagiography invites self-reflection among late-medieval Christian readers. Readers might ponder what, in the text resembles their own culture, and whether their late-medieval perspectives were better represented by the Christian or pagan characters. She notes, for example, regarding Bokenham's St Katherine, that English churches abounded in finely crafted material objects through which parishioners "might reasonably take exception to Katherine's...belief about the futility of temple-building, and find unexpected common ground with the pagans" (93). Salih's focus on audience reception is one of the many strengths of this chapter, as she discusses how readerly identification/disidentification rendered pagans good to think with about late-medieval issues ranging from organized religion to devotional art. In the final section, "The Idols Fall," Salih identifies a contradiction between the location of the fall of idols in the Biblical past and the medieval need continually to reconstruct idols in texts, images, and theatrical performance.
Chapter 3, "The Present: Traces, Recurrences, Survivals," examines "eruptions and traces of the pagan past in the late medieval Christian present" (115). These "eruptions and traces" range widely, from actual and legendary Roman artefacts, to accusations of "pagan" idolatry in late medieval England, to pagans residing in the exotic locales ofMandeville's Travels. In "Processing Pagan Fragments," Salih claims that while pagan texts had been successfully incorporated into late medieval English culture, material remnants of the pagan past posed more challenges to this translation process. Salih further argues that the fragmentary nature of pagan culture extends from pagan artefacts to pagans themselves ("Feeling like Pagans"), a point she establishes by way of a tour de force analysis of Foucault's genealogy of the emergence of European subjectivity. Legendary lost pagan artworks, a favorite subject of late-medieval ekphrasis, evoke longing and admiration that belies their location ("World of Loss"). Actual pagan remnants, including those scattered throughout Rome, evoke similar emotions, a point Salih illustrates in a richly detailed reading of Capgrave's Solace of Pilgrims. The longest section of this chapter, "Idolatry and the Image Debate" revisits a familiar scholarly topic--debates on devotional images in the age of the Lollard heresy--but does so with a new interest in mind: "how the debate galvanizes the history and concept of paganity" (144). Lollard accusations of idolatry against the established church temporally displaced paganity from the "secure marker" of a pre-Christian past to "a chronology-troubling effect," one signaled by the eruption of "paganity" in late-medieval England (144). "The debate about images," Salih notes, "was a contest for the right to spot the pagan" (144). The chapter closes with "Pagans of the present in Mandeville's Travels," an examination of pagans in the "Mandevillean multi-text," by which Salih indicates the many textual variations and illustrations of Mandeville's Travels. Salih argues that the Mandeville narrator "imagine[s] how...pagans might explain themselves," andeffectively "pull[s] the sting of paganity" (161), although some iterations of the Mandevillean multi-text opt to reinsert it.
A brief coda, "The Future," revisits a point Salih makes throughout, that the imaginative positioning of pagans vis-à-vis medieval cultures parallels the positioning of medieval vis-à-vis modern ones.
In assessing Imagining the Pagan, I find no obvious shortcomings and am left with only one unresolved question, which pertains to Salih's fifteenth century focus. Although I identify the book's historical scope as a strength, I would like more information as to how the author arrived at it. In the Introduction, Salih delineates the chronological parameters for her study, which extend from "the period following Arundel's Constitutions" just up to the Reformation (7). Historical demarcation by way of Arundel suggests that Lollardy is a key factor in determining the book's scope, and Lollardy plays an important role in some portions of Salih's study. To my mind, however, Lollardy is not sufficiently central to justify the Constitutions as a chronological starting point. In explaining her chronological scope, Salih also references James Simpson and Michael Sargent, who identify the fifteenth century as a period of remarkable discursive openness (7). In the case of Simpson, however, this claim applies to a period beginning in 1350. I bring all this up because, to me, Salih's designated era seems at once overdetermined by Lollardy and underdetermined by a notion of discursive freedom. I found myself wondering, is the imagining of the pagan in the fifteenth century fundamentally different from fourteenth century imaginings? If something changed in the transition between centuries, what was it? As much as I appreciated Salih's movement beyond the fourteenth century, I wondered what continuities or distinctions might be drawn between the works of the two centuries, or between previous medievalist scholarship on the fourteenth century virtuous pagan (Frank Grady) or imaginings of Troy (Sylvia Federico) and the sort of work that Salih so astutely performs here.
As I hope this review indicates, Imagining the Pagan is an outstanding book and has much to recommend it: theoretical sophistication, mastery of scholarship, rich close readings, and an energetic turn of phrase (the phrase "demonic squatter" was my personal favorite, 165). While Imagining the Pagan will obviously appeal to scholars interested in the medieval reception of pagan antiquity, it also has much to offer any scholar interested in late-medieval English culture more broadly, not to mention non-medievalists interested in materialism or the history of ideas. As an academic writer, I am left "thinking with" this book, for it models what deep thinking looks like and what the best academic scholarship can do.