Reality Fictions offers a deft exploration of the complex relationships that underpin the cultural work of narrative expression in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Stein's deceptively simple overture states, “This is a book about literary innovation” (1). Yet despite this unassuming introduction, the book ambitiously couples a theoretically informed approach with a thoroughly grounded knowledge of texts and history to address many of the most prominent concerns occupying contemporary medievalists, such as the formation of modern European states, the interplay among literacy and orality, the cultural role of tradition, and the contemporary construction of history. The result is a frequent and compelling inversion of many of the orthodox teleologies found in general literary histories.

Stein's inquiry focuses on the intimate relationship between romance and historiography within territories controlled by the Anglo-Norman and Capetian ruling families, arguing that the two genres “grow out of the same cultural need and intend to do the same cultural work” (2). To illustrate “how changes in formal representational practices not only witness but participate in the structure of power by their play of complicities and resistances to change,” Stein selects a few careful examples, choosing texts “from borders rather than political centers, and always from contested or ambiguous territory” based on the principle that the“margins of sovereignty are the centers of narrative innovation” (6). Perspicuously, Stein acknowledges that his task “inevitably arises from our own contemporary situation” (4), namely, that in which nonstate actors have become important historical agents even as the state maintains a role within the historical arena. This stance allows Stein to eschew models of literary study in which national literatures and their forms coincide with the formation of a modern state, and thereby rather gauges how narrative representation, at particular moments in different polities, could be used to legitimate and challenge political authority by giving the present, or conversely depriving it of, the appearance of inevitability.

The study first considers the narrative enterprise of Gerard I, bishop of Cambrai, who in 1024 commissioned the compilation of a three-part historical chronicle, the Deeds of the Bishops of Cambrai, as well as the construction of the textual archive on which the chronicle was based. As such, these texts are assertions of power for a figure and authority that straddled two linguistic frontiers as well as competing ecclesiastical and political boundaries (the bishop was an imperial appointment but also a suffragan of the archbishop of Rheims). Chapter 2 shifts focus to the narration of the English nation after 1066, examining representations of Harold Godwinson, the last Anglo-Saxon king, as well as of Waltheof, earl of the disputed region of Northumbria. Therein, Stein undermines the conception of the political violence in the west and north between 1066 and 1075 “as rebellions against the king of a state that appears to exist prior to its actual political existence” (90). Consequently, the victory at Hastings represents one point within a protracted contest for ambiguous territory; the central importance of 1066 as a pivotal historic date emerges only after the consolidation of political power.

The third chapter argues that “romance is an attempt to seize directly the significance that in history appears only as a disappearance, the meaning at the heart of events that seems always about to announce itself but remains ever out of reach, and to seize it directly as a matter of historical understanding” (106). In his study of Geoffrey of Monmouth's prose Historia Regum Britannie, Stein elucidates narrative occasions conventionally thought of as the provenance of romance and presents a strong argument for overturning traditional associations that confine romance to composition in verse and in the vernacular. Yet the reader senses that much of this chapter is less attached to explorations of specific political events and attendant cultural production than the previous two. Stein, presenting romance as “inseparable from the consciousness of social and political processes in the secular world” (125), offers persuasive readings of Chrétien de Troyes' Chevalier au Lion and Marie de France's Guigemar, but the link to political power is less explicit than that found in Gerard of Cambrai's narrative enterprise, for example. Chapter 4, which picks up with Chrétien and Marie before discussing Raoul de Cambrai and the Chanson de Girart de Roussilon, returns to the footing of the first two chapters. Herein, the inverted “From Romance to Epic” explores how tradition represents itself and argues for another kind of inversion in which, as elites “mark their opposition to the new order by claiming for themselves the authority of tradition,” tradition becomes “the very opposite of a conservative gesture” (172) and can develop into a “locus of resistance” (208).

The broad theoretical background that informs Stein's approach is accessibly presented, allowing the reader to be aware of the framework but never constrained to a single dogma of textual interpretation. Inevitably, however, in such a wide-ranging work that offers sophisticated analysis in a straightforward guise, moments arise in which the reader feels that a more explicit definition or more extended elaboration of a concept would be appropriate. For example, in a paragraph discussing the “already existing world of texts upon which writers [of history and romance] draw to make a new text” (166), the repeated references to “texts” and “works” would benefit from reference to Paul Zumthor's work (Essai du poétique médiévale [Paris: Seuil, 1972]). Likewise, the discussion on the negotiation of ethnic identities after the conquest omits Hugh Thomas's The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity, 1066–c. 1220 (Oxford University Press, 2003), which one might assume appeared too late to be included but for references elsewhere to works that appeared after (94).

Furthermore, while Stein's precise prose nimbly navigates Bakhtin and Bhabha, one senses the occasional misstep elsewhere. For example, when discussing William of Malmesbury's use of compaginatum to describe the joining of the deceased Waltheof's once severed head to his body (97), Stein cites Charlton Lewis and Charles Short's Latin Dictionary (New York: American Book, 1907) to boost the claim that it is a relatively rare word. However, the Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources (ed. R. E. Latham and D. R. Howlett, 12 vols. [Oxford University Press, 1975–]) cites a good number of examples, including one from William's contemporary Henry of Huntingdon. The discrepancy suggests that during the classical and late antique period covered by Lewis and Short, compaginare, “to fasten,” was likely relatively rare, but that as a verbal derivation from the noun compago, “fastening, joint,” the word became more frequently used in the Middle Ages. In a similar vein, reference to the recent edition of The Chronicle of John of Worcester (ed. Reginald R. Darlington and Patrick McGurk, 3 vols. [Oxford University Press, 1995–]) rather than Benjamin Thorpe's nineteenth-century edition, which attributed the chronicle to Florence of Worcester, would have spared the book from employing an outdated attribution.

Yet, these minor quibbles in no way detract from the force of the overall arguments. The careful, well-crafted elucidations of Stein's work never fail to test previous assumptions and spark further lines of inquiry. The exploration of the cultural negotiations that attend literary innovation not only casts a unique light on the eleventh- and twelfth-century works under Stein's specific scrutiny but prompts ways to consider more broadly the cultural function of narrative in a variety of contexts. This timely study yields an enjoyably challenging and original book that should serve as a model for informed, considered, and provocative literary history.