Andrew Wallace, The Presence of Rome in Medieval and Early Modern Britain: Texts, Artefacts and Beliefs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020. xviii + 248 pp. ISBN: 9781108496100. £75 hardback.

The idea, expressed by Joachim Du Bellay in 1558, that ‘le plan de Rome est la carte du monde’ is the starting point for this impressive, interdisciplinary study of how a range of British writers, from Gildas to Milton, negotiated their relationship to ‘a world mapped by Rome’ (223). The study argues for Rome’s rooted presence in British culture from the summer of 55 BCE and Julius Caesar’s first arrival on these shores, exploring what it calls the ‘fact of Rome’ (from Latin facta, things ‘made, done, built, framed and accomplished’ (4)) across a broad range of disciplinary perspectives. ‘Rome’, for Wallace, is an all-encompassing term that stands for the city, the empire, the church, and the Latin language through which Roman cultures, pagan and Christian, are mediated, and readers aware of Wallace’s previous work on Spenser and early modern pedagogy will encounter much that is familiar in this study’s central focus on how Latin learning shapes the later literature of Spenser and his contemporaries. At the same time, The Presence of Rome also broadens its scope beyond pedagogy, bringing medieval and early modern writing into dialogue with Roman ruins, religious pieties, and doctrinal debates, as well as with the body of European vernacular and neo-Latin writing – from Petrarch to Dante, Du Bellay and van der Noot to Montaigne – through which ‘Rome’ is mediated for writers like Spenser. Indeed, one of the achievements of this study is its articulate reiteration of an oft-told truth: that British culture in Spenser’s day was as entangled with Rome as with the Roman cultures of France, Italy, and the Low Countries.

Chapter One, ‘The Ordinary’, focuses on the presence of Romano-British ruins and material remains, in writing by Gildas and Bede, and in Beowulf and the Old English poem, ‘The Ruin’. Chapter Two, ‘The Self’, turns to Latin language acquisition in Elizabethan England, focusing on contrasts and continuities between Spenser’s Protestant and Donne’s Catholic pedagogical experiences, and on its impact on their later writing, before moving on from textual to actual encounters with the ruins of ancient Rome in writing by Thomas Wilson and John Milton. Chapter Three, ‘The Word’, extends this discussion of the way Latin grammar and lexis is encountered at school to the question of how schoolboy learning shapes encounters with the Latin verbum Dei, specifically Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, in conversion narratives by Augustine, Luther, and Luther’s English translators. Finally, Chapter Four, ‘The Dead’, focuses on Reformation debates over, and reformulations of, the Roman Office of the Dead in English prayer books of the mid-sixteenth century, showing how reformers gradually suppressed connections between the living and dead established in pagan and Catholic Roman burial practices. Chapter Four begins with an extended discussion of Chaucer’s Prioress’ Tale and goes on to trace some of the implications of this silencing of the dead in More’s Utopia and in Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Hamlet. A brief conclusion focuses on Ovid’s lament for the loss of Rome in Tristia, and on the ironies of Ovid’s own entanglement, as an ‘Englished Roman’, in early modern grammar school culture.

This is by no means the first study to draw attention to Rome’s presence in medieval and early modern literature, nor the first to highlight what Wallace calls ‘Rome’s persistence’ (14) within the imaginary of a millennium of British writers, from Gildas to Milton. Wallace is right to root the origins of Britain’s entanglement with Rome in the remains of Roman Britain rather than in Rome’s ‘rediscovery’ by Renaissance humanists, but to say that these Romano-British origins ‘have been insufficiently attested by scholarship on the early modern period’ (14) is to overlook the recent contributions of Lynn Staley and others to these debates.[1] Much of what Wallace explores in individual chapters is also indebted to, and builds on, the outpouring of recent scholarship on topics including representations of Roman ruins and material remains – classical, Catholic, and Romano-British – in Spenser and English Renaissance writing, and the longevity of Catholic beliefs and practices in English Reformation literature and culture.[2] Wallace’s achievement, then, is not to blaze a trail so much as to bring some well-furrowed, but wide-ranging, critical perspectives together under the banner of ‘Rome’. In the process, Wallace offers new insights into the extent of Britain’s entanglement with Rome, and the pressures that Latin learning exerts upon the self. Along the way, there are original new readings of some well-thumbed literary texts, including Beowulf, Chaucer’s Prioress’ Tale, and Spenser’s Complaints.

For a book whose title draws attention to Rome’s entanglement with the cultures of ‘medieval and early modern Britain’, the study is also curiously Anglo-centric in its choice of literature and landscape, dwelling on metropolitan writers – Chaucer, Spenser, Donne, Shakespeare, Milton – and on Romano-British material remains in the Thames Valley, Hexham, and Hadrian’s Wall. Wales gets no mention in the (admittedly brief) index to this work, and yet the role of Wales as a mediator of Romano-British culture throughout the period under analysis is well-attested in recent criticism by Philip Schwyzer and others.[3] As John Davies of Hereford writes, in ‘Cambria’ (1603), Wales is replete with Romano-British ruins – with ‘pleasant Plots where erst the Romaines built/ Faire Citties for their Legions to liue in’ – ruins now ripe, according to Davies of Hereford, for restoration and renewal under the Stuarts.[4] Such sentiments testify precisely to that ‘persistence of Roman Britain’ (219) in early modern England and Wales that Wallace is concerned to place at the forefront of his critical enquiry, but which, in Chapter One, he instead achieves via the single, and rather singular, early modern example of Sir Thomas Browne’s discovery of burial urns in mid-seventeenth-century Norfolk. The Introduction does briefly draw on the twelfth-century Welsh Breudwyt Maxen Wledic and its ‘dream’ of Roman Britain, but there is more material from Wales and the Marches that Wallace might have included here. In a study that signals its archipelagic ambitions through the term ‘Britain’ in the title, it is surprising that Wallace has chosen not to explore, as part of his focus on ‘Britain’s’ entanglement with Rome, England’s own entanglement with the Romano-British culture of Wales in this period.

Spenserians will find particular interest in Chapter Two, which reads Spenser’s 1569 and reworked 1591 translations of Du Bellay’s Songe, his 1591 translation of Du Bellay’s Antiquitez (Ruines of Rome), and his Visions of the Worlds Vanitie (1591) through a pedagogical lens, arguing that ‘English schoolboys were Rome’s spectators’ (73-74), and that Du Bellay’s mediation of Spenser’s encounter with Rome positions Spenser as the disappointed newcomer (‘nouveau venu’) to Rome of Du Bellay’s Antiquitez 3, who is left to search futilely in the rubble for a city that seems ‘somehow, impossibly, elsewhere’ (81). Wallace sees Spenser’s uncanny encounter with Rome in these translations as part of the encounter ‘with the self made “strange”’ (73), which for Wallace defines the English schoolboy’s experience of Latin learning, as a necessary process of self-fashioning achieved through ‘years of effort’ (73). The argument that Spenser internalises his encounters with Rome’s ruination in ways that shape and shift his own construction of selfhood is then applied, by Wallace, to a reading of Spenser’s Visions of the Worlds Vanitie, which Wallace sees as a ‘series of miniature fables of the means by which the world worms its way into the embodied self’ (93). In Visions of the Worlds Vanitie, Wallace writes, the self is no longer simply the spectator of Rome’s destruction but becomes entangled and infiltrated by it. These visions can ‘therefore be understood as Spenser’s effort to come to terms with what he has learned from Du Bellay’s visions of Rome’ (92).

What Wallace calls Spenser’s ‘poetics of secret infiltration’ (94) sets in train a series of readings across Chapters Two to Four in which ‘Rome’ is seen to infiltrate, or inhabit, the self – its ruins, religion, language, and grammar an uncanny reminder of ‘that distant city’s entanglement in aspects of the ordinary’ (9). Wallace’s focus, in Chapter One, on the material remains of Roman Britain is part of this emphasis on ‘Rome’s nearness and familiarity’ (9), but the message might have been reinforced still further had Wallace explored that other poem in Spenser’s Complaints which bears traces of Du Bellay’s influence – The Ruines of Time. The influence of Du Bellay’s ‘Songe’ on Spenser’s closing sequence of visions in Ruines of Time is well attested, but Wallace’s reading of Spenser as ‘spectator’ of Du Bellay’s Rome opens up suggestive new readings of how far Spenser’s entanglements with Du Bellay may also have influenced the opening lines of Ruines of Time, in which the narrator stares, like Du Bellay’s ‘nouveau venu’, with some disappointment at the rubble, not, here, of Rome, but of the Romano-British city of Verulamium – ‘Of which there now remains no memorie, / Nor anie little moniment to see’ (lines 4-5). In this, Spenser’s imitation of Antiquitez 3, we find a similarly ‘uncanny’ encounter with the strange made familiar, but one that emphasises this familiarity by rooting its encounter with Rome in Roman British soil. Wallace’s approach to the poems in Spenser’s Complaints therefore offers promising foundations for further research on Spenser’s entanglements with versions of Rome, and versions of the self, in poems beyond those covered in this study.

The Presence of Rome is not, by its own admission, a systematic survey of Rome’s presence on British soil, but ‘an attempt to capture some inflections of Rome’s persistence’ (14) across the period under analysis. While the study underplays the amount of recent scholarship that draws attention to how far Gildas and other early medieval writers were recognised in early modern England and Wales as mediators of the Romano-British inheritance, The Presence of Rome nevertheless succeeds in showing how deeply the ‘multifaceted phenomenon’ (223) of Rome infiltrates the soil of medieval and early modern Britain. Wallace applies admirable learning, interdisciplinary ambition, and a fluent appreciation of neo-Latin and vernacular literatures to a subject – Rome – that crosses cultural and disciplinary frontiers. What we learn in The Presence of Rome is that Rome exerts its presence as much on the early modern self as on the material and textual cultures of the self’s surroundings – that Rome expands to meet the world, and to map our ‘little world’ within.

Stewart Mottram

University of Hull 

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