Angels on the Edge of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000-1534.

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