H-France Review Volume 13 (2013) Page 1 H-France Review Vol. 13 (November 2013), No. 167 Michelle R. Warren, Creole Medievalism: Colonial France and Joseph Bedier’s Middle Ages . Minneapolis.: University of Minnesota Press, 2011. xxxii + 379 pp. Bibliography and index. $25.00 U.S. (pb). ISBN 978-0-8166-6526-6. Review by Andrew M. Daily, University of Memphis. Michelle Warren opens her account on the colonial politics of medievalism with a familiar colonial scene: a young Réunionnais migrant, freshly arrived in the metropole, contrasts the vibrancy and modernity of Paris with the lassitude and backwardness of the home colony. As Warren’s young worker laments, “It’s like I came from the Middle Ages… we are savages” (p. xi). Movement across space is also movement through time, from the medieval atavism of the colony to the modern vitality of the metropole.[1] The wonder and confusion occasioned by the “voyage in” operates as a familiar trope in immigrant and colonial literature, whether Antilleans on their way to London and New York, or West Africans to Paris and Liverpool. In a reverse of the colonialist “voyage out,” the contrast between the poor colony and the rich metropole establishes a fecund moment for colonial critique, ironic self- reflection, and heroic self-fashioning.[2] The life and work of the medievalist Joseph Bédier (1864-1938) complicates this literary trope. Through Bédier, the principal subject of her study, Warren guides us through the intertwined literary and racial politics of Réunion’s white elite (the creoles of her title). Rather than painting Réunion’s “medievalism” as a lack or deficit, Bédier and his Réunionnais—they preferred “Bourbonnais,” invoking Réunion’s pre- revolutionary name—compatriots instead celebrated it, casting their home island as the preserve of the values and virtues of the French Middle Ages, values and virtues which made France France and made France great. “I am not a man of the present,” she quotes a proud Bedier, “ but of the Middle Ages” (p. xi). Bédier, the scion of a prominent creole family, well-connected in both political and literary circles, was among the most eminent medieval scholars of the Third Republic, composing critical works on Les faiblaux as well as virtuoso translations of Tristan et Iseut and Le Chanson de Roland. Elevated to the Académie Française in 1920, he maintained a significant literary and scholarly presence through the waning days of the Third Republic. As Warren notes, when he died in 1938, Bédier’s obituary appeared in over 200 newspapers, and tributes poured in from throughout the nation and the empire. Warren is a scholar of medieval literature whose previous work has focused on the emergence of proto- national identity in medieval texts, as well as how nineteenth-century nationalisms mobilized medievalism to establish the bounds of nation and national identity. Creole Medievalism fits into her previous work and expands upon it, extending her studies of nationalism’s use of imagined medieval pasts into the colonial context. As Warren remarks—and to which her extensive notes and bibliography bear witness—Bédier’s impact on medieval scholarship and French literature have been subject to extensive comment, but the influence of Bedier’s creole and colonial origins on his aesthetic and political interventions has been largely overlooked.