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Title: History on the Edge: Excalibur and the Borders of Britain, 1100-1300 by Michelle R. Warren ISBN: 0-8166-3491-2 Publisher: University of Minnesota Press Pub. Date: 14 April, 2000 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $34.95

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Average Customer Rating: 2 (1 review)

Rating: 2
Summary: Make sure you know what you're buying...
Comment: If you're an 'armchair' medievalist, a fan of the Arthurian legends, or an SCA-enthusiast looking for nice easy-to-read books on King Arthur to enrich your amateur enthusiasm for the Middle Ages, stop right there-- Michelle Warren's _History on the Edge)_ is *not* for you.

This book is directed, rather narrowly, at postmodern medievalist scholars, and is filled with highly theoretical, jargon-laden literary scholarship of the sort that makes even seasoned grad students wince. Unless you're already familiar with the critical apparatus of that subfield of literary theory known as "post-colonial studies", you'll be hopelessly lost. Here's a typical example of the abstract and jargon-laden character of the prose: "The border, as a figure of paradox, cuts across multiple concepts, joining them indelibly as it separates them irretrievably. Historiography represents the simultaneity of these paradoxes in time. If... the management of paradox constitutes historical consciousness per se in the Middle Ages, border historiography represents a hyperconsciousness that textualizes modes of possession" (p. 16).

So, what does Warren actually have to say behind all of this academic cant? What is this book actually about? The answer is relatively simple-- essentially it's about borders. Specifically, it's about British/English borders in the Middle Ages and how medieval history-writing about King Arthur was a discursive locus for the deployment of complex, contradictory, and often ambivalent notions about British history, identity, ethnicity, geography, nationhood, the legitimacy of military conquest, and a host of other issues that can be and are symbolized by concept of 'the border'.

The medieval texts Warren examines are those that purport to be historiography-- like Geoffroy of Monmouth's _History of the Kings of Britain_ (and variant forms thereof), Wace's _The Roman de Brut_, or more literary works which make a conscious effort to place Arthur within a historical context (like the French Vulgate Cycle). More purely literary representations of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table-- such as the lais of Marie de France, the romances of Chretien de Troyes, the tale of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, etc. are not discussed at all (presumably due to the absence of historographical intent .)

Warren's analysis of these texts essentially consists of a combination of close reading and a kind of translation of the events described in them into the language of post-colonial lit-crit. At times, this takes on the character of allegory, with Warren paraphrasing the story and then imposing a border-theory jargon of the symbolic content of each detail. After noting that the duel between Arthur and Frollo takes place on an island in the Seine, for instance, she remarks, "Since Geoffrey sites this resolution in an insular space, it serves as an allegory of the colonization and defense of Britain itself". A possible reading, perhaps, but it still seems a bit forced, as do other examples. At some times, Warren's jargonification of narrative events becomes unintentionally humorous, such as when she observes (about the same duel) that it is ends when Arthur's sword "inscribes an indelible boundary between the two sides of Frollo's head".

Oh yes, speaking of Arthur's sword... it should be noted that the subtitle of this book is 'Excalibur and the Borders of Britain'. She also observes, in the introductory chapter, that swords are an especially crucial symbol of the 'border issues' she discusses because "coercive boundary formation engenders ambivalence [and] Swords purvey this ambivalence, as their symbolic effects belie the certitude of their original edges [and] formally incarnate the boundary paradox: their edges divide trenchantly while forming the blade's indivisble unity. Swords' intimate relations with human bodies further enhance their liminal ontology." I certainly won't argue with that, but when it comes to performing her actual analysis, the fact is that Warren really doesn't spend all that much time talking about Excalibur or swords generally-- it is merely one detail among many that she discusses in each case.

Ultimately, Warren's argument boils down to the following idea: These various medieval texts embody the same kinds of 'border writing' issues that contemporary post-colonial theory talks about and this suggests that medieval historiography of Arthur (particularly in the period immediately following the Norman Conquest) was embroiled with a variety of different attitudes towards the island's unity, political geography, and the merits of conquest and domination generally. So, there you have it. On the one hand, that's a fairly interesting and original point. On the other hand, it begs many other questions-- such as whether or not Arthur is unique in that way, or whether the same can be said of *all* historiography in that period? More intriguingly, one wonders how it might be applies to the more purely poetic material that's ignored-- after all, Arthur was not primarily a historiographical figure during this era, but a literary one. More interestingly, one might want to know whether, how and why, this sort of 'border writing' changed later on once the Crusades began, or during the 100 years war-- subjects that aren't really discussed here.

In sum, Warren has made a clever application of postmodern colonial theory to unlikely medieval sources and raised some inttriguing questions. But I still don't feel like that's enough to justify the extreme difficulty of the book's language, its failure to explain why some other things weren't discussed, and the fact that much of it really does seem to be just the translation of narrative events into contemporary jargon. So, I can only give this 2 stars, in spite of the fact that it is an intriguing piece of scholarship.