Review

Reviewed Work(s): Medieval Practices of Space by Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka
Review by: Michael T. Davis
Source: Speculum, Vol. 78, No. 4 (Oct., 2003), pp. 1307-1309
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Medieval Academy of
America
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20060966
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 Reviews 1307
images remains critical to the reader's perception and understanding of profound meaning,
as well as the realization of a spiritual impetus to moral action.
Hahn addresses this problem of reading images more successfully in her admirable con
cluding chapter on Matthew Paris as the culmination of a long tradition on the brink of
change and innovation. In his remarkable illustrated Vie de Seint Auban in Dublin, Mat
thew created a new, almost cinematic narrative as the viewer's gaze is drawn across the
half-page images in each opening, moving from "action to reaction to inevitable conse
quences." In Hahn's astute observation of how he marshals evidence of sanctity by amass
ing visual detail to create the effect of authenticity as if he were presenting a legal brief for
canonization, she consistently places the narrative strategies of his hagiographical illustra
tions within the larger framework of the Chronica majora. In support of her contention
that Matthew Paris bridges both worlds of Benedictine monasticism and the secular court,
she convincingly interprets the interpolation of the story of Aracle as a powerful extension
of St. Alban's Vita into the more contemporary regime of chivalric narrative that in turn
significantly advanced the idea of lay sanctity.
In conclusion, the short epilogue takes us beyond the chronological scope of Hahn's
book to suggest other possibilities in narrative innovation in the later Middle Ages, not
only in illustrated manuscripts but in stained glass and fresco cycles as well. Thanks to her
brilliant and wide-ranging interrogation of the experiences of reception, the narrative effect
on the reader-viewer, Cynthia Hahn has given us fresh and invaluable insights into the
power of pictorial hagiography to induce an interior consciousness of profound meaning
beyond the mind's comprehension of words and images, that of creating an effect on the
soul that might ultimately be "portrayed on the heart."

Suzanne Lewis, Stanford University

Barbara A. Hanawalt and Michal Kobialka, eds., Medieval Practices of Space. (Me
dieval Cultures, 23.) Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Pp.
xviii, 269; black-and-white figures and tables.

Let us imagine a late-medieval Parisian Schoolman trolling the booksellers' shops for the
latest manuscripts along the rue Neuve Notre-Dame in the shadow of the cathedral's west
towers. From a table of codices he picks out Practices of Space. The terse title triggers a
wave of associations. He might recall Plato's Timaeus, which presents space as "ever-ex
isting Place, which admits not of destruction, and provides room for all things that have
birth;... it is somehow necessary that all that exists should exist in some spot and occupy
some place." Certainly, Aristotle's doctrine of place in the fourth book of the Physics,
defined as the innermost immobile surface of a containing body, would come to mind. He
might also think of Jean Buridan's more recent assertion that "space is nothing but the
dimension of body and your space the dimension of your body" (Physics 4.10) or scan the
folios for confirmation of Thomas Bradwardine's corollary that "a void can exist without
a body, but in no manner can it exist without God" (De causa Dei contra Pelagium).
It is not quite true, as Michael Camille asserts (p. 9), "that there was no such thing as
'space' for medieval people," for, as the many studies of Edward Grant have shown, it was
the subject of a sustained and lively debate, but one that probed such questions as "Where
is God?" or "Did a void space exist before the creation of the world?" and the concept of
imaginary space. In the course of formulating their arguments, scholars were drawn into
a consideration of problems concerning place: was it a containing surface, as Aristotle
seemed to assert, or should it be conceived as a separate three-dimensional space, as the
"common" or "vulgar" opinion held, which found learned adherents, including Albert of
Saxony and Jean Buridan, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries? To be sure, the spaces

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 1308 Reviews
of human creation and activity, those of city streets and plazas, church interiors, or the
stage, were viewed as unproblematic. As Buridan put it, the space or distance between two
objects was "nothing but the magnitude of the intervening air or of another intervening
natural body."
To enter into a meaningful dialogue with the ten articles of this book, our imagined
Schoolman would need to revise his conception of space or place as immobile and pr?ex
istent and come to terms with the Kantian notion that it is the active product of human
intellection. As Kant concluded in the Critique of Pure Reason, "It is solely from a human
standpoint that we can speak of space." The profound resonance of this inversion of the
understanding of space has been explored by, among others, Jonathan Z. Smith, in To Take
Place: Toward a Theory of Ritual (Chicago, 1987), into the realm of humanistic geography
that insists that human experience in space confers meaning to place and, conversely, that
the interpretation of the meaning of places is inextricably bound up with the interpretation
of the subjective meaning of persons (p. 28). It also forms the deep background for Henri
Lefebvre's seminal text, La production de l'espace (1974) and its English version, The
Production of Space (1991), which asserted that the "science of space" represented the
political, integrated into the forces of production, and implied a concealing ideology. Fur
ther, he declared, "spatial practice consists in a projection onto a (spatial) field of all aspects,
elements and moments of social practice. In the process these are separated from one an
other, though this does not mean that overall control is relinquished even for a moment"
(p. 8). For the present volume, Lefebvre's use of spatial analysis to unmask social and
political structures, supplemented by the work of Gaston Bachelard, Pierre Bourdieu,
Michel de Certeau, and Peter Jackson, to name a few, opens new avenues for investigating
sites, monuments, performances, and texts that composed the medieval environment.
The studies gathered in Medieval Practices of Space open out centrifugally to treat the
varied uses of space as metaphor, language, and definition. Hanawalt and Kobialka orga
nize the succession of chapters into three main categories (p. x). First, the mapping, uses,
and definitions of urban space are represented by the studies of Michael Camille, Daniel
Smail, and Charles Burroughs on, respectively, Parisian street signs, notarial linguistic car
tography in Marseilles, and the interaction of architecture, politics, and legal procedure in
Florence. Next comes the ecclesiastical and theological practice of space, in which Andrzej
Piotrowski explores the representational functioning of the Byzantine church in light of the
issues swirling around the iconoclastic controversy, Michal Kobialka argues that destabi
lizing events in the later eleventh century cracked open a historical space that led to the
institutionalization of representation in monastic observance, and Valerie Flint muses about
the use of space as a means of discipline through distancing, exclusion, or penitential
pilgrimage. Consideration of performance and "staging one's belonging" informs the ar
ticles by Donnalee Dox, which proposes three different spatial readings of the Croxton
Play of the Sacrament, by Jody Enders, which lays bare the anti-Semitism encrypted into
the theatrical staging of the Mistere de la Sainte Hostie, and by Kathleen Biddick, which
analyzes the views of Nuremberg contained in the Nuremberg Chronicle of 1493. Finally,
Tom Conley returns us to Paris via Fran?ois Villon's Testament and in particular "Les
contredictz de Franc Gontier." Drawing upon categories of literary space defined by Paul
Zumthor in La mesure du monde (pp. 242-44), Conley discovers in "poetic" medieval
space an intimacy between world, writer, and reader that "can serve as a measure for action
in our time" (p. 244) through its reversal of the trend toward fragmentation, separation,
and disintegration.
As an ensemble, the chapters yield fascinating insights about ways in which space was
used, articulated, and ornamented in the Middle Ages and offer working examples of
strategies that have lately been developed to explain those attitudes and practices; however,
surprisingly little is said about the ways in which contemporary conceptions of space were

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 Reviews 1309
brought to bear in the process of creation. To cite but one example, in the urban sphere,
Marvin Trachtenberg's Dominion of the Eye (1997) has drawn attention to the suggestive
intersections of the methods by which trecento Florentines shaped their city as a three
dimensional composition of public space and architectural forms with a "nervous mixture"
of traditional Aristotelian and newly emergent spatial theories implemented through geo
metrical construction. Likewise, the chambered framework patiently erected by Dox seems
to me exemplary in its capacity to accommodate an analysis of medieval theatrical space
based on modern performance studies that then opens into an exposition of the relevance
of the fourteenth-century debate on space to the organization of dramatic performances of
the Croxton Play of the Sacrament. More frequently, we as readers are offered a banquet
of specific events, legal regulations, institutional rules, or theological tenets that may have
conditioned the spatial parameters of specific architectural, devotional, or dramatic prac
tice; less often is the veil of particulars drawn aside to reveal their location in relation to
the defining boundaries set by medieval thought.
Despite the pretense of crossing disciplinary boundaries, Medieval Practices of Space
does not quite overcome the centrifugal forces that push the humanities apart, and the parts
do not manage to coalesce into a greater whole. There is, to be sure, an interdisciplinary
gathering between the book's covers, but while subjects may push traditional disciplinary
and methodological limits?Camille's extension of the medieval art-historian's view to
encompass street signs takes a page from studies in urbanism and modern architecture
launched by Kevin Lynch in the 1960s and Robert Venturi in the early 1970s?they do
not, to my mind, "perturb" history or historiographie practice, as is rather smugly claimed
(p. xvii). To move against those divisive partitions would have required the contributing
scholars to "trade places," for, say, Dox to look at the interior of Hosios Loukas in terms
of her categories of theatrical space, mutable space, and the space of the imagination, or
Conley to merge his consideration of Villon's poetic mapping with a discussion of the
spatial, physical, or symbolic structures of the actual city considered by Camille, Smail,
and Burroughs. Nevertheless, the theoretical threads, thematic echoes and contrasts, res
onating suggestively between the independent atoms of Medieval Practices of Space, invite
active readers to fashion their own networks of connections between past and present,
between spatial theory and artistic practice in the street, the church, or on the page and
hint at the ample common ground that awaits future exploration.

Michael T. Davis, Mount Holyoke College

Dag Nikolaus Hasse, Avicenna's "De anima" in the Latin West: The Formation of a
Peripatetic Philosophy of the Soul, 1160-1300. (Warburg Institute Studies and Texts,
1.) London: Warburg Institute; Turin: Nino Aragno, 2000. Paper. Pp. x, 350 plus 2
unnumbered pages. ?32.
This book studies and reassesses the influence of Avicenna's work on the soul in the Latin
West. His De anima was translated by Avendauth, in collaboration with Gundissalinus, in
Toledo sometime between 1152 and 1166, which was the starting point of a successful
Nachleben in the later Middle Ages, with a peak in the first half of the thirteenth century.
Avicenna's text, however, has often suffered from mistranslation and misinterpretation,
both by medieval and by modern authors. It was often viewed as an impediment to the
proper understanding of Aristotle's philosophy. Hasse's aims, therefore, are to look both
at the Arabic original in order to see what Avicenna really meant and at the Scholastic
tradition in the Latin West in order to see how Avicenna was translated, read, and inter
preted. As an excellent Latinist who is also very competent in reading Arabic, he is well

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