In this, her first book, Marisa Libbon has provided evidence and argument about the seven manuscripts of the romance Richard Coeur de Lion that will fascinate anyone interested in book history, in how editors reconstruct the texts we read, in how we choose to interpret them, and in how fourteenth- and fifteenth-century English people remembered their national past. She has taken up Richard I because cultural memory of him became so central to the English during the Hundred Years War with France and because, beginning in the early 1290s, Edward I began to issue quo warranto writs demanding that holders of lands and privileges demonstrate in courts of law continuous use of them by their ancestors before the reign of Richard I. Moreover, Richard Coeur de Lion in itself presents a problematic instance of reconstituting medieval texts because the late nineteenth-century “complete” edition by which the romance has been chiefly known to medievalists was made up from only one late manuscript and one early printed edition, in spite of the editor’s awareness of six other manuscripts, two dated decades earlier than the manuscript edited. Behind Libbon’s project, too, looms the so-called War on Terror and the politicians’ language of crusade, for the core of the romance in all of its versions is Richard’s success in lifting the siege of Acre and its most sensational material involves his eating of the flesh of Saracen captives. Crusade romances, we know all too well, now stand front and center of the most troubling and contested Western cultural memories of encounters with the Islamic world.
Libbon’s project, like much innovative scholarship, seems as if it should have been done some time ago. She approaches Richard Coeur de Lion as a retrospective text, stories about the past told in a time and a place in which people are invested in selectively remembering, molding, and promulgating that past. She simply believes that the local talk that was shaped by cultural memory and common knowledge guided text-makers is somewhat recoverable by examining extant objects, like images and architecture, as well as other texts and by considering the events of a given time and place. Each of her five chapters presents one facet of her methodology. She first queries how medievalists produce a text for literary criticism based on the professional talk of their time (here chiefly letters and reviews). In the case of Richard Coeur de Lion, the standard text, a critical edition of 1913, was created by the Viennese philologist Karl Brunner, who privileged, as did many editors of his time, the longest and most correctly written manuscript. Yet, she argues persuasively, his editorial choices in Richard Löwenhertz were also shaped by a fin-de-siècle Vienna that, as it expanded, kept telling old local stories of Richard’s supposedly ignominious capture in a low-life setting by Austrian crusaders. As an Austrian, Brunner insisted that the episodes set in “Almayne” were essential, in spite of the fact that the two earlier manuscripts of the romance do not contain them; he produced a “monument to Vienna’s Richard” (56).
“Public Talk and Legal Fictions,” the second chapter, examines legal records as sources for talk about Richard I, especially where disputes preserved in the plea roles or unofficial reports contain something of a narrative of the ancestors or, in the case of a city or an abbey, the predecessors in office, of quo warranto defenders. Libbon sees these plea narratives, based on inherited memories and drafted to fit the exigencies of the present, as filling in the historical void in the popular memory of Richard I created by his long absences from England. These legal narratives, she reminds us, were heard before large crowds in the shire eyre courts and so fed popular talk about the king.
In the third chapter, “Talking Pictures in Fourteenth-Century London,” Libbon studies the line drawings that follow text and illuminated pages in MS. Christ Church (Oxford) 94, an adaptation of that widely disseminated Fürstenspiegel, the Secreta Secretorum, made for the young Edward III about the time he became king. Creating a context from other texts, objects, and paintings involving Richard I, she posits that the drawings, with their old-fashioned armor and siege engines, would have represented the siege of Acre for early-fourteenth-century English readers. In spite of its text on ruling wisely, the manuscript also contains these line drawings that present a great predecessor of Edward not as a model king within his realm, but as an exemplar of crusading.
In her fourth chapter, Libbon challenges Geraldine Heng’s approach to Richard Coeur de Lion as an accretive text, an approach that privileges an “aggregated product” or “complete” text made of fragments added over time (142-43). Arguing in terms of book history in this chapter and the next, she reads each manuscript of the romance as a unique product of a text-maker who, by addition, excision, revision, and choice of fragments or modules, created the romance narrative about Richard I suited to the maker’s local culture, to recent political events, and to his sense of what contemporary readers thought they knew about Richard I. The earliest manuscript, she observes, contained the core story of Richard’s battles in Sicily, Cyprus, and Muslim territory, while later versions add or omit episodes in a collaboration between text maker and local people who remembered the king and crusader in ways suited to their own familial, political, and legal interests. In these last two chapters, Libbon presents her modular reading of the seven manuscripts from all over England over a century and a half as a model for how to read retrospective texts in general. She astutely places these two different ways of approaching the romance in the wider stances scholars adopt to the Middle Ages. Rather than trying to “make the past whole and coherent” (190), her modular method of reading, a late outgrowth of the new philology, sees “the historical record as an artifact of productive fragments” (206).
Plotted out cleverly and written with verve, Talk and Textual Production is a credit to the series in which it appears and to the general editor, Ethan Knapp. Although I am not well versed in book history and so am unable to judge some of Libbon’s specific claims about the manuscripts, I found her multiple ways of studying them fascinating, impressive, and keenly argued.