Documentary Culture and the Making of Medieval English Literature. By Emily Steiner. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pp. xvi + 266; 11 Illustrations. $60.00

In this revision of her 1999 Yale dissertation, Emily Steiner proposes that "documentary culture was shaped, in part, by the formal, ethical, spiritual, and political aspirations of late medieval English writers " and that this "documentary culture " (which she associates primarily with the law) "helped shape an identity for English literature: the work it performs, the stories it tells, and the authority that it claims for itself " (p. 10). The latter is her more central and the more interesting claim, but it depends on inferences about the dynamic forces "at the intersection between documentary culture and late medieval literature " (p. 10) that prove difficult to support with persuasive evidence or convincing logic. Her intuitions about the important, even at times definitive, relations between law and literatureÊof which she shows herself a maturing studentÊmay well prove right, but this book's repeated assertion about decisive relations between them reveal stronger conviction than persuasive argument.

Míceál F. Vaughan
University of Washington, Seattle