Stephanie Trigg, Shame and Honor: A Vulgar History of the Order of the Garter
Philadelphia , University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012.
The Order of the Garter may seem a marginal formation
affording little but risible photographs of ancient British grandees and royal
hangers-on, but Stephanie Trigg, senior medievalist at the University of
Melbourne, has produced a cultural history that traces not only the personnel
and operations of the Order over time but more importantly shows how its
managers have responded to social and political changes in subtle and sometimes
far-reaching ways (with a lot of early modern activity in the sixteenth
century). These variations have kept the Order, however apparently
antediluvian, operating with surprisingly wide-ranging impact to the present.
This sort of cultural history has two modes: one simply, and
usefully, charts the process through time of the subject; but the other mode,
more interestingly, reverses that process and uses the institution under study
itself as an index and text of changing sociopolitical concerns over time and
in radically varying contexts. This mode generates some interesting surprises
:the Garter was not, Trigg argues, fully endorsed by the regnant queens Anne
and Victoria; she also moves challengingly into a discussion of the concept of
`a queer Garter’.
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