Fiction and History in England, 1066–1200. By Laura Ashe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 244. $95.

I can remember my sense of intellectual excitement as, Ph.D. just in hand, I read the presidential address of James C. Holt to the Royal Historical Society published in its Transactions (32 [1982]). His topic was family history read through the colonialism of the Norman Conquest: "England [of 1066] was a colonial country, a notion which Englishmen find difficult to grasp, because on this occasion they were on the receiving end…" (pp. 205–6). Holt was gently prodding scholars of twelfth-century England to think historicity together with a traumatic colonial kernel in all of its intersecting, overlapping, and contaminating messiness. His proposal, so suggestive then, seems so obvious now in 2008, thanks to the energetic unfolding of postcolonial medieval studies over the past quarter-century. Such studies have troubled received notions of colony, nation, sovereignty, race, ethnicity, gender, genre, periodization—indeed, historicity itself. However, in the process of its institutionalization in the academy, postcolonial medieval studies has tended to narrow down on questions of identity politics measured by indices (most notably, language, genre, law) and to map on time-lines the vicissitudes of Normanitas, Englishness, Celticness. Depending on the chosen index, scholars calibrate the consolidation of Englishness in the aftermath of the Norman invasion back and forth along such timelines (1130 being an early calibration). Laura Ashe marks 1170 as the chronological point at which a weak Normanitas fades away and Englishness triumphs. Such timelines condense rich research agenda and render them comprehensible at the same time that they flatten postcolonial medieval studies into a normalizing representation of continuity and change. time-lines of this sort unfortunately cut through the time-knots that Dipesh Chakrabarty has conjured so eloquently in his study, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (2000): "What I have called subaltern pasts may be thought of as intimations we receive—while engaged in the specific activity of historicizing— of a shared, unhistoricizable, and ontological now. this now is, as I have tried to suggest, what fundamentally rends the seriality of historical time and makes any particular moment of the historical present out of joint with itself " (pp. 112–113).