Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000-1534.
Breeze, Andrew
Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English
Community, 1000-1534. By Kathy Lavezzo. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. 2006. xvi + 191 pp. 36.95 [pounds sterling]. isbn:
978-0-8014-4429-6.
This attractively produced book consists of an introduction and
five chapters. In the introduction the author (of the University of
Iowa) discusses maps and ideology, as shown, for example, by the British
Empire's red-tinted cartography. Thereafter her subject is national
identity in maps and writing from Bede to Skelton. The first chapter
deals with early versions of Englishness, as in Gregory's encounter
with English slaves at Rome. Chapter 2 discusses Gerald of Wales and the
Anglo-Norman conquest of Ireland. Chapter 3 is concerned with England in
Ranulf Higden's Polychronicon; chapter 4, with gender, justice, the
Orient, and England in the Man of Law's Tale; and chapter 5, with
Speke Parott, Wolsey, Henry VIII, and England's self-representation
against papal Rome. The book also includes twenty-five figures of maps,
and an index, but there is no bibliography.
Geographical perception in early times is a promising theme. Yet it
receives scant justice here. Readers will not find the book
'breathtaking', 'compelling',
'indispensable', or 'hugely influential' (despite
such claims on the cover). The trouble is not in the author's
postmodern and postcolonial views: many excellent studies of the Middle
Ages cite Lacan, Homi K. Bhabha, Freud, and Julia Kristeva, as does
Lavezzo (p. 13). The problem lies, rather, in defects of knowledge,
reasoning, and method.
Defective knowledge shows up in factual error. Gregory's
encounter with English slaves was not 'first recorded in
Bede's Ecclesiastical History (731)' (p. 27). It first appears
in a life of Gregory written before 714 at Whitby. Gregory's
admiration for white English slaves cannot imply 'racist
distaste' for their 'darker-skinned Arab masters' (pp.
38-39). The slave-dealers were also English: Englisce cypmenn, as stated
by the Catholic Homilies. Arthur's Marian devotion is not one
'beginning with Geoffrey of Monmouth's' account of
Arthur's shield (p. 103): the motif occurs in Historia Brittonum,
compiled three centuries before.
As for defective reasoning, this appears through wild assertion. We
hear that English slave-boys had white skins, thereby 'reflecting
the whiteness of the cliffs of Albion', so that readers may
'envision imaginatively a land apart from the world and admire the
white cliffs of Dover, topographic signs of a national integrity that
transcends historical disruption' (p. 86). Latin canon law had been
a 'nourishing mother' (p. 97) of English common law; yet in
Chaucer's day lawyers were struggling 'to extricate themselves
from what had become a suffocating ecclesia mater not unlike the
notoriously "suffocating mothers" represented by the Man of
Law via the Sultaness and Donegild', two 'infamous
mothers' who 'endeavor to stifle their respective sons'
efforts to move beyond their immediate family (p. 97)'. The name of
king Alla, 'with its uncanny evocation of the god of Islam'
(p. 100), 'above all' binds England to Syria. What more? In
his Textual Subjectivity (Oxford, 2005), A. C. Spearing attacks readings
of Chaucer 'limited only by the powers of human fantasy' (p.
105); and fantasy, not reasoning, is what we have here.
Nor does method fare any better. The author, despite hundreds of
bibliographical citations, shows little real interest in early
perceptions of space. We learn nothing substantial of the maps
reproduced, despite the colonialist implications (particularly for Wales and Ireland) of places shown on them. To do that requires an
understanding of the past that the author lacks. For all its neat design
and printing, then, Angels on the Edge of the World should be avoided.
After reading (for example) its stereotyped account of Anglo-Normans in
Ireland, one may even warm to Seamus Heaney's remark, 'Not all
empires are bad'. In short--the kind of book that gives
postcolonialism a bad name.
Andrew Breeze
University of Navarre, Pamplona
