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Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn.

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Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn By David Wallace Oxford: Blackwell, 2004

Premodern Places is a bold book that does not fit neatly into conventional categories. It is comparative in many senses: it considers writers writing in Latin, in several European vernaculars, in English, and in the Surinamese creole, Sranan; it considers several media including painting, cartography, engraving, even architecture; it reaches across geographic areas and boundaries, as its full title indicates, from Calais to Surinam by way of Flanders, Genoa, southern England, and the Canaries; it juxtaposes literary and nonliterary genres; and it spans traditional period boundaries by breaking down not only the medieval/early modern divide but by reading Coleridge, Blake, Evelyn Waugh, and David Dabydeen beside Eustache Deschamps, Boccaccio, Chaucer, Dante, Shakespeare, Heloise and Abelard, Margery Kempe, Julian of Norwich, and Aphra Behn.

But what is most ambitious about Premodern Places is Wallace's argument itself, which seeks to demonstrate, to play with Bruno Latour's arresting title We Have Never Been Modern, that we have always been modern. Wallace shows how some of the most resolutely "modern," even postmodern, recent topics, issues, and processes of historical research and political and cultural critique--capital accumulation, technological innovation, colonialism, slavery, globalization--are present in premodern places and times. Thus his learning challenges received ideas not only about the medieval and the early modern, but about the modern, the postcolonial, and the postmodern as well. Premodern Places is thus part of a larger recent effort among some critics working in medieval and early modern studies to expose and analyze the presentism of much contemporary cultural commentary and critique. It richly deserves to be read by anyone working in literary and cultural studies today.

Wallace begins by questioning the familiar notion of England's insularity, only now supposedly under assault by the Chunnel and challenged by the euro. He asks us to imagine the channel of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries not as a "defensive moat," but as a "roadway," and English territory as extending into continental Europe (2). The first chapter, "At Calais Gate," begins with a reading of Hogarth's popular anti-Gallic, anti-Catholic engraving, "The Gate of Calais," to remind us that for...

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