I gave it my best shot but in the end this book pretty much defeated me. There are several major problems with something like this, which is ultimately designed for the academic market and not for laymen and bloggers. Anything in this review that looks like a criticism of this book should actually be taken as a declaration of my own inability to function at the level of the scholars whose work appears in this collection.
There seem to be debates that these essays are addressing but they have gone on out of range and I'm not up to date with them so I felt left out for this reason while reading this book. Even the editor’s introduction was too hard to easily con. And in many instances the essayists tantalisingly leave out the dates of things that are central to the stories they are telling. This information is sometimes included, but it’s usually buried in the notes, so short of scurrying to the end of an essay to check this critical piece of information each time a publication or an event is mentioned, in many cases you are left up in the air without anything to hang onto.
Also, there are long passages of Middle English that are not translated. Even some Latin and Old French passages are not translated. This might seem like a minor hindrance but when you are anyway wrestling with very complicated ideas and unfamiliar narratives, the lack of English translations in these cases is a hurdle that is often too high to get over.
Some of the essays furthermore use a lot of postmodernist terminology and associated ways of thinking, so nailing down ideas in these kinds of narratives is very hard, like trying to shoot with a BB gun a flock of swallows that are swooping round in a barn. This kind of language should be the first thing that an editor gets rid of when putting together a book for the layman. In the end I finished one of the essays, which was about the Lollards, and found another one, on the kingship of Charles V, to be clear enough but like most of the others too rarefied to work with in the context I had already formulated and had brought to the task from previous reading.
What reading this book told me is that there is a need for a general-interest book on the rise of nationalism in the late Medieval period. Because this book focuses particularly on the English experience, such a trade-market publication could also stick to the UK but I think that it would be better if it looked at the emergence of vernacular literatures in different parts of Europe. Certainly, the Lollards were conscious that other nations already had vernacular Bibles. The relationship between the king and the nation, also, seems to be fertile ground for ideas about nationalism in this period, going by what I was able to glean from the essays in this book. One of the essays I didn’t complete talks about the different orders of knighthood that were inaugurated in this period of history, and there seem to be ideas about the monarch and the commons, and the various grades in-between, that could bear fruit if a new book were planned on this subject.
The reason why the question or nationalism at this moment in history is important is because of the continuing significance for people in the west (and, frankly, in all parts of the world) of the Humanist project that gave rise to the Protestant Reformation and thereafter to such things as science and technology. The links between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, in this regard, are of central importance to our understanding of where, as a culture, we have come from and where we are going. We otherwise risk getting trapped in stale arguments where ideas function in many cases much like internet memes. We need to go beyond the obvious and try to understand in detail what actually happened.
Especially in the light of contemporary political challenges to such things as the rule of law and democracy, it is critical to be on sure ground when people are faced with the problem of fitting their own stories into the increasingly complex tapestry of human experience. Popular consciousness of the facts surrounding the origins of the Humanist project can only help the many people who seek to find in the west the things that they associate with modernity, such as justice, prosperity, peace, and a meaningful life.
There seem to be debates that these essays are addressing but they have gone on out of range and I'm not up to date with them so I felt left out for this reason while reading this book. Even the editor’s introduction was too hard to easily con. And in many instances the essayists tantalisingly leave out the dates of things that are central to the stories they are telling. This information is sometimes included, but it’s usually buried in the notes, so short of scurrying to the end of an essay to check this critical piece of information each time a publication or an event is mentioned, in many cases you are left up in the air without anything to hang onto.
Also, there are long passages of Middle English that are not translated. Even some Latin and Old French passages are not translated. This might seem like a minor hindrance but when you are anyway wrestling with very complicated ideas and unfamiliar narratives, the lack of English translations in these cases is a hurdle that is often too high to get over.
Some of the essays furthermore use a lot of postmodernist terminology and associated ways of thinking, so nailing down ideas in these kinds of narratives is very hard, like trying to shoot with a BB gun a flock of swallows that are swooping round in a barn. This kind of language should be the first thing that an editor gets rid of when putting together a book for the layman. In the end I finished one of the essays, which was about the Lollards, and found another one, on the kingship of Charles V, to be clear enough but like most of the others too rarefied to work with in the context I had already formulated and had brought to the task from previous reading.
What reading this book told me is that there is a need for a general-interest book on the rise of nationalism in the late Medieval period. Because this book focuses particularly on the English experience, such a trade-market publication could also stick to the UK but I think that it would be better if it looked at the emergence of vernacular literatures in different parts of Europe. Certainly, the Lollards were conscious that other nations already had vernacular Bibles. The relationship between the king and the nation, also, seems to be fertile ground for ideas about nationalism in this period, going by what I was able to glean from the essays in this book. One of the essays I didn’t complete talks about the different orders of knighthood that were inaugurated in this period of history, and there seem to be ideas about the monarch and the commons, and the various grades in-between, that could bear fruit if a new book were planned on this subject.
The reason why the question or nationalism at this moment in history is important is because of the continuing significance for people in the west (and, frankly, in all parts of the world) of the Humanist project that gave rise to the Protestant Reformation and thereafter to such things as science and technology. The links between the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, in this regard, are of central importance to our understanding of where, as a culture, we have come from and where we are going. We otherwise risk getting trapped in stale arguments where ideas function in many cases much like internet memes. We need to go beyond the obvious and try to understand in detail what actually happened.
Especially in the light of contemporary political challenges to such things as the rule of law and democracy, it is critical to be on sure ground when people are faced with the problem of fitting their own stories into the increasingly complex tapestry of human experience. Popular consciousness of the facts surrounding the origins of the Humanist project can only help the many people who seek to find in the west the things that they associate with modernity, such as justice, prosperity, peace, and a meaningful life.
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