Medievalist Enlightenment from Charles Perrault to Jean-Jacques Rousseau <i>Medievalist Enlightenment from Charles Perrault to Jean-Jacques Rousseau</i> . By A <scp>licia</scp> C. M <scp>ontoya</scp> . (Medievalism, 2.) Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2013. viii + 248 pp.

How wise Johan Huizinga was in 1919 in choosing the title Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen (The Autumn of the Middle Ages) — for what would become his best-known book, thus refusing to define a specific end to the medieval period. In France three foundational structures of the Middle Ages — monarchy, feudal custom, and the Catholic Church — survived well into the revolutionary era: France was declared a republic only in 1793, while the National Assembly's comité féodal worked for years to abolish the remnants of seigneurial privilege and tenant obligation that continued to frustrate the peasantry. The Church was reviled, reformed, exiled, and finally restored in triumph by Napoleon to many of its privileges and duties. Alicia C. Montoya shows us another aspect of ‘the long Middle Ages’ in France: its literary survival and influence. Focusing on the neglected period 1680–1750, she argues that ‘modernity arose in part out of literary medievalism’ (p. 4), which was able to serve different agendas, whether liberatory or conservative. This, she claims, is because the secular vernacular literature of the Middle Ages enabled a rethinking of classical aesthetics, an anticipation of romanticism, and an impetus towards the fully fledged Enlightenment of the next century. The book is divided into three main sections, not chronological but recursive. Part I, ‘Conceptualizing the Medieval’, engages the seventeenth-century debate on the relation of modernity to the medieval and classical past. Key figures are Charles Perrault, Jean Chapelain, and Rousseau. Part II, ‘Reimagining the Medieval’, takes on the rehabilitation of chivalric romance: the genre's presence in private libraries and in female readership, and its use in ‘ego-documents’ (p. 83) such as letters or journals. The correspondence of the Marquise de Sévigné anchors discussion of class-inflected uses of the genre. The emergence of medievalist opera is discussed in the context of the embodiedness, performativity, and ‘heightened theatricality of the medieval’ (p. 108) and of medievalist cultural practices. The new genre of fairy tale is fitted into the framework of performativity — perhaps less convincingly — through its special use of irony, narrative voice, and ‘metadiscursive stance’ (p. 129). The ‘reconfiguration’ of the Abelard–Héloïse correspondence by Madame de Sévigné, Rousseau, and others embodies a ‘uniquely modern, lived form of medievalist Christianity’ (p. 181) and would influence the epistolary novel. Part III, ‘Studying the Medieval’, shows how a new academic medievalism emerged from the ‘non-scholarly mondain medievalism’ (p. 186) of the late seventeenth century. Centred on the Académie royale des inscriptions et belles-lettres, this section explores the conflict between two versions of medievalism: ‘an aristocratic model of amateur engagement with the medieval, and a newer, bourgeois model of professional historiography’ (p. 186). Here, Jean-Baptiste de La Curne de Sainte-Palaye, the comte de Caylus, and Montesquieu are three key players. In filling so plentifully the period she has chosen, Montoya offers an exhilarating journey through early modern scholarship and makes a distinguished contribution to the current field of medievalist studies.

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