Laments for the Lost in Medieval Literature (review)

Reviewed by: Laments for the Lost in Medieval Literature Andrew Klein Jane Tolmie and M. J. Toswell, eds. Laments for the Lost in Medieval Literature. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 2010. xii + 306 pp. EUR 60,00. "Grief," Jane Tolmie, co-editor of this volume, wisely notes, "is not contained or solved by art. Quite the contrary. It is preserved and passed on to the reader or audience for specific purposes, didactic, affective, and memorializing" (284). Tolmie's observation in her essay "Spinning Women and Manly Soldiers" is also an effective comment on Tolmie and M. J. Toswell's volume. The essays in Laments for the Lost in Medieval Literature, the nineteenth volume in Brepols's Medieval Texts and Cultures of Northern Europe series, all attempt to identify on some level how and to what end [End Page 144] medieval cultures pass grief on via literary art. The result is an impressive mixture of critical approaches and divergent texts that are still connected by their central theme, grief and lament, and even more, as Anne Klinck points out in her contextualizing essay, by "the mourning of dead children" (17). Klinck observes that the topic of lament is "overwhelming" in its ambiguity of precise definition (1). To this end, Klinck's introductory essay helpfully provides distinctions between elegy and lament while tracing the history of the lament genre and different types of lament from Homer to Milton. Klinck's expansive introduction, then, serves as a useful net to cast over the majority of the essays in the collection, especially for those less familiar with medieval lament literature. Among the most significant qualities of this collection is the various although complementary critical approaches found throughout. A particularly observable trend is the use of "trauma studies" or "trauma theory" in approaches to medieval laments. Thus, Mary Ramsey in her essay "Dustsceawung: Texting the Dead in the Old English Elegies" grounds her discussion in the psychoanalytic theory that sufferers of intense trauma must "externalize" their experience to recover from it. And while Ramsey discusses Old English texts, Tolmie also points us to trauma theory in her analysis of the Middle English Massacre plays, establishing the cumulative psychological effect of the biblical traumas of the Fall, the Massacre of the Innocents, and the Crucifixion that finds expression in the depiction of women (by men) in the Middle English plays. Approaching medieval literature through trauma theory is a savvy, rarely explored move that fits the subject matter especially well, since it provides a useful nexus of critical approaches that is at once poststructuralist, historicist, and psychoanalytical. The use of theories of trauma is but one consistent approach in the volume. In Joseph Harris's intelligent and thought-provoking analysis "'Myth to Live By' in Sonatorrek," which is an updated version of a 1999 paper,1 Harris convincingly argues that real laments in Old Norse culture were modeled on mythic ones, using the archetypal lament of Odin for Baldr as a case study. Harris ends with a diagram (171) that illustrates the impulses that lead to the development of literature, a diagram that gives literature, myth, ritual, and anxieties equal generative potential to lead from one to the other. Significantly, each essay in this collection might be looked at as participating in a facet of Harris's diagram. [End Page 145] Ramsey's essay, for example, is an insightful analysis of Old English elegy that blends archaeological study of burial sites such as Sutton Hoo with literary analysis, carefully describing the ritualistic significance of grave goods. Ramsey shows that ritual burial gives rise to the Old English elegies, as one branch of Harris's diagram illustrates, and the elegies themselves become containers of memory that perpetually transmit their contents to future generations. Anne Savage's essay, "The Grave, the Sword, and the Lament: Mourning for the Future in Beowulf," takes a similar approach: beginning with a Foucauldian reading of "the connection between archaeology and mourning" applied to the grave sites like Sutton Hoo (68), Savage moves to a discussion of how objects link us to the dead, describing Beowulf itself as an artifact and a cultural grave site, one that contains and reveals different levels of both parental and...

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