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R. Howard Bloch, Alison Calhoun, Jacqueline Cerquiglini-Toulet, Joachim Küpper, and Jeanette Patterson, eds. Rethinking the New Medievalism. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins UP, 2014. 288 pages.
For medievalists who entered graduate school after 1990 the commotion over the "new" or "material" philology or medievalism is difficult to fathom.1 One searches Stephen G. Nichols' seminal articles, especially his introduction to a now-renowned special issue of Speculum in 1990, in vain for anything controversial: the case for lending the material medium of a given work of literature as much attention as its language and for considering the historical context within which it was produced and circulated seems thoroughly reasonable.2 Even the potentially plausible argument against the New Philology, that it was not "new" because it only reiterated what medievalists were already doing, is defused by a re-reading of Nichols' introduction to the special issue, for this was precisely his point of departure. His stated aim was to articulate a shiftin focus detectible in scholarship from the period just after World War II: he never claimed to be proposing an entirely new approach. Indeed, his term for the relationship between the New and the Old Philology was "renovatio." The New and Old Philologies were not meant to be understood as dichotomies. Rather, the New built upon the meticulous attention to language of the Old, renovating, not negating, it. In preparation for this review of Rethinking the New Medievalism, a volume of essays collected in Nichols' honor, I searched for objections to the New Philology to better grasp the early controversy. However, this yielded little fruit, for criticisms "rarely found their way into print, being confined instead to the corridor and coffee rooms."3 But what was at stake became clear when I turned to the volume. Rethinking the New Medievalism not only showcases the wide range of Nichols' influence but also charts the development of the New Philology and sheds light on the sense in which the position that he laid out in the Speculum special issue was indeed polemical.
R. Howard Bloch's introduction sets the stage by tracing Nichols' key role in giving expression to the spirit of the New Philology which Bloch summarizes as "an attention to the material conditions of the medieval work, especially to the givens...