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ANANYA JAHANARA KABIR and DEANNE WILLIAMS, eds. Postcolonial Approaches to the European Middle Ages: Translating Cultures. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp.xii, 298. ISBN: 978-0-521-8273-7. $80.
The eleven essays collected in this volume cohere principally around an insight that might seem obvious in hindsight but which is no less profound for its obviousness: that postcolonial approaches to the European Middle Ages are not anachronistic, as some critics have complained, because the Middle Ages were, by virtue of the fact that they were inaugurated by the fall of the Roman Empire, in fact, already postcolonial. They come after empire; indeed the very word 'colonial,' as Seth Lerer points out, derives from the Latin colonia, for the sorts of military settlements that dotted the Roman empire (79). This audacious move takes back theory for the Middle Ages, demonstrating that medievalists need not be content merely to apologize meekly for applying theory 'anachronistically" to their subject but, as Bruce Holsinger argues in a 2002 Speculum article, can confront the presentist bias of contemporary theory, recognizing and building upon the literally groundbreaking work of medievalists who have always figured (often invisibly) in the development of literary theories, including postcolonialism. Suddenly everything old is new again; some very...