BOOK NEWS AND REVIEWS

Publishers' announcements 

The news, features, and reviews on this page are primarily for networkers whose first or second occupation is writing - in the arts, the media, politics or education. We will include books from any period or culture,and any school of thought, which are valuable as reference for the new, broad-ranging cultural history research which will follow the first translation of the complete Roman de Rou. The present focus is the 12th Century Anglo-Norman 'Renaissance' and the Norman heritage - '1066' is the traditional starting point for all manner of debates, historical and contemporary and (of course) scholarly and the date is embedded in the Anglo-Saxon international consciousness like lettering in stick of rock.     But is there any truth in the legend? There will be studies of Wace, or new understandings of his Roman de Rou applied to original interpretations of Anglo-Norman history and culture- from its beginnings to the 21st Century. Relevant subjects can be Russian sagas, Byzantine morals, so-called peasants' revolts, the lunacy  of the Latin mindset, Mycenean archeology, multi-cultural politics or popular songs and drama. Please note that the reviews are copyright of the authors. This page will be updated quarterly. Last update 18 April 2002. Publicity announcements are the publishers. *indicates that the book has been provided for review.

The Normans in Their Histories: Propaganda, Myth and Subversion Emily Albu Hardcover  The Boydell Press; ISBN: 0851156568

Decoding Norman History Emily Albu's book is both erudite and accessible, and readers who are discouraged because they think they don't know enough about the intellect, wit and creative daring of the classical Latin satirists should persevere - or begin with the section on the revealing Anglo-Saxon subtext of the Bayeux Tapestry. Authors' subtexts are what Albu's book is all about. As a study of the art of writer-oriented interpretation, and the use of classical references to reveal the true meaning of the obligatory eulogies for patrons, it should be required reading for all students of literature - classical or medieval - and European political history, at any period. This is much more than a professorial monograph about the Normans as depicted in their interminable propaganda and myth-making dynastic epics. For writers, in any culture and any field of endeavour, who have managed to outwit unimaginative and authoritarian agents or editors who insist on being told the structure before you know the story, or have refused to submit to the rules and regulations of dumbing down, this book will be a companion in the darkest nights of their souls. They will find further confirmation for their own unstated beliefs - or suspicions - in this intriguing investigation of the minds and hearts of genuinely creative, highly-educated and independent authors in search of true poetic justice. (Centuries may have passed and your works misunderstood or neglected, but we hear you.) For history teachers and students, for people who watch 1066 re-enactments (or websites) and anyone who has kept their BBC videos in order to educate their grandchildren, this book will come as a profound shock.

The real symbol of Norman power was not the legendary papal banner flaunted by William the Conqueror that put the fear of God into the defenders of Anglo-Saxon liberty, but the treacherous, rapacious, roving and sharp-toothed wild beasts who literally wolfed down everything and everyone in their path. The invasion and the eventual conquest of England - multi-ethnic, divided and embattled as it may have been - was horrific in its effect and it consequences. One way to understand the total cultural revision which was the permanent result it is to picture the psychological and emotional equivalent of a strait-jacket. A parallel is the lesser (but still traumatic) individual equivalent of writers being told, in a less developed and clumsy imitation language, to stop thinking in their own sophisticated and ancient language and re-write everything - not in the conqueror's NewSpeak but in a clodhopping simplified version of the Latin once refined and intellectualised by independent iconoclastic wits such as Horace and Ovid (and we know what happened to him......).Students of English - which means most, if not all writers - know that, before 1066, the Anglo-Saxon poets laughed in Latin, applying their ingenuity to a mercurial form of self-expression whose sole purpose was to outwit their grammatically-correct masters. Students of Norman chronicles (from A level history, if not before) aren't taught that this was the natural inclination also of writers on the other side of the Channel. The separation of 'literature' from 'history' has had a seriously detrimental effect on our cultural imagination. Emily Albu has identified this same wit, with long-lasting political implications, in the chronicle of the first official Norman historian. Albu is clearly an author who believes that the crafting of a subversive personal language is the privilege and social obligation of writers everywhere. Satire - the main subject of her well-informed study - from blatant parody to bitter irony, has been the refuge of independent writers since the beginning of recorded civilization (and is still the pride and democratic heritage of England's irreverent culture) which is, perhaps, why ancient poets and playwrights never seem to date - or is it that writers have always been centuries ahead of their cultures? Since classical times, and long before that in older societies, outspoken political critics and poets have exposed the dynastic myths and propaganda of their power-mad rulers and patrons with courage and impressive subtlety. They enabled all of us to recognize that satire, as well as revealing the reality of political scams, also dignifies the victims of repressive regimes whose leaders kill creative enterprise and independent opinions. But, as Albu proves, writers always have the last word, however long it takes to be understood. The craze for 'hermeneutics' (named in honour of Hermes, the Greek muse of minstrelsy and doublethink) spread all over the Northern Europe a thousand years ago, an elaborate form of linguistic self-parody. This hilarious language mixed archaic Latin and Greek words together with disapproved declensions, resulting in a hotch-potch of grandiose prose and unreasonable rhyme that nevertheless shouted its meaning to those in the know, even if it defied translation (or even serious study) until the early 1990s.

Emily Albu did not need to claim that she has blown these myths or is decoding the propaganda - as she relates, the medieval chroniclers did this themselves. But even the few Conquest iconoclasts in England have not quite managed to steel themselves to state their case. As so often happens, it takes an erudite Californian - innocent of Euro-political motives - to enable doubters here to say exactly what they think. She is not, perhaps, the first academic writer to have cracked the complex hermeneutic code. But she understands it, in its turbulent and terrifying political context, as subversive irony, and is surely the first interpreter of Normandy's implausible foundation epic to have identified Dudo's subtexts, just as the later state chroniclers, who (as she explains) revised and extended his work, must have done. She reveals that all the apparently pro-Norman historians, wherever they wrote, intentionally parodied and so subverted the achievements of their loathed patrons. This makes her book the most illuminating, if not the most radical, history of the conquerors ever written. It is also witty and, perhaps, full of her own subtexts. Readers familiar with the eternal debate on the rights and wrongs of 1066 and the Conquest of England (why did Shakespeare never write a play about it?) will know that historians of the Norman era long ago denounced Dudo's (presumed) panegyric of pirates and polyglots as useless for the proper study of 'Duke' Rollo and his dynamic descendants, apparently the ancestors of our very own Royal Family. But Dudo's tour de force was his 80 or so outrageously hermeneutic poems. The Victorian editor of this first European secular history gave up and simply deleted the lot. There was no proper complete academic translation until - amazingly - 1998. So Albu's first chapter is a further translation from a different perspective. She describes how Dudo of St. Quentin craftily peppered his work with allusions to classical Latin propaganda and (literally sub-versive) satirical poetry. Startled at what she discovered - and knowing well the Roman satires and ironic political histories these chroniclers certainly read - she also decoded the post-Conquest writings. Not surprisingly a Professor of Classical and Byzantine literature at the University of California (Davis) Albu then investigates available journals and poems of the Normans and shows how they were, at that time, thought of by the writers (some of them also advisors to the rulers) as inherently pathological, violent, greedy and treacherous colonizers. Those names always quoted as 'authorities' in books about 1066 and its aftermath - the Williams of Jumièges, Poitiers, Malmebury - and the less-known chronicles of the conquests of Sicily and south Italy, are all re-interpreted here. Albu also details the meanings of the Anglo-Saxon women weavers' fringe illustrations, which cleverly contradict - or, at least, question - the 1066 saga as depicted in the Tapestry. 
    In her concluding chapter she reviews recent studies on the 'sane-generation' translations and adaptations of Dudo and his followers, written by the mid-12th Century Anglo-Normans in their own language. Their popular rhyming epics, especially Roman de Rou by 'Master' Wace, tell a very different and still-controversial story. (Her section on Wace is not reviewed here since she did not have access to the new translation or the most recent studies). Emily Albu's book recommends itself for paperback. And there is still the puzzle - ironic in the extreme - of why half of her title, obviously the most significant half, given her subject, is missing from the book's dust cover.

Domesday Descendants: Prosopography 2

A Prosopography of Persons Occurring in English Documents 1066-1166 II: Pipe Rolls to `Cartae Baronum' 

K.S.B. Keats-Rohan 

This second volume of persons named in English records between 1066 and 1166 follows on from its predecessor Domesday People: [Of] undoubted importance...in understanding the nature of Norman aristocratic society and the forces within it... a monumental effort. HISTORY Drawn from extensive and wide-ranging research in British and French archives, the 7500 entries in this volume provide the first authoritative prosopographical key to over 60,000 names found in English administrative documents such as the Pipe Rolls and the Cartae Baronum, as well as various Surveys and thousands of royal and private charters. Both volumes focus upon regional origin, family, and the descent of fees, and together they provide the most complete view to date of the people responsible for the conquest and colonization of England. Dr K.S.B. KEATS-ROHAN is Director of the Linacre Unit for Prosopographical Research and Fellow of the European Humanities Research Centre, University of Oxford. 

First published: 2002   Price: 200.00 USD, c.120.00 GBP

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