After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text by Brian Stock (review)

Abstract

142arthuriana The title ofJohn Scattergood's new book would seem to promise a discussion of the shape or even possibility ofa history ofalliterative poetry, but The Lost Tradition is in fact a collection offifteen essays—five new, ten others written over the course of twenty-five years and for a variety ofpurposes. Through close readings ofindividual poems, he aims to show how they 'are seriously engaged with large issues ofa political, social, and personal kind' (12). Scattergood brings a magisterial command ofhistory and philology to his work, which at its best shows how much alliterative writing was at once highly conventional and thoroughly topical. Less successful are some of the essays on texts that are better known and have already attracted a significant body of critical commentary. Sometimes the problem is a result of Scattergood's decision to reprint articles without updating references to other scholarship; hence few today would claim, as he does in his 1989 essay on Winner and Waster, that 'a limited and limiting twentieth-century view, which effectively denied artistic status to anything which could remotely be described as politically oriented or socially engaged, has impinged on it' (72). Other essays, such as that on sins ofthe flesh in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or Wrong's laughter in Piers Plowman CIV, seem constrained by Scattergood's thematic approach. It is as ifhis sense ofsingular purpose, which leads to so much of genuine interest in An Old Man's Prayer or A Satire on Consistery Courts, ultimately seems too limiting for works with multiple perspectives and layers of meaning. There are also some missed chances. It is understandable but nonetheless unfortunate that Scattergood draws few connections between essays, despite the fact that several treat similar themes (e.g., obedience and servitude, the power oflanguage). Nor, with a couple of notable exceptions, is there much discussion of the particular resources ofalliterative verse as a form. He tends to write about alliterative poems in relation not to other alliterative poems, but to general literary and political contexts, and this approach is useful to the extent that it prevents us from thinking ofalliterative verse as some quaint insular oddity. But given Scattergood's strengths as a close reader, it would be interesting to see more ofhis thoughts about the language and rhythm of the verse form, even (or perhaps especially) when the content of a work is either thoroughly conventional or highly topical. There is, finally, an excessive number of typographical errors. The Lost Tradition never resolves the questions raised by its title, and ofcourse this may be precisely Scattergood's point. Nevertheless, many of the essays are models of close reading and contextual criticism, and several will be essential points ofreference for future scholarship. KEVIN GUSTAFSON University ofTexas at Arlington brian stock, After Augustine: The Meditative Reader and the Text. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. Pp. 132. isbn: 0-8122-3602-5. $32.50. The publisher's advertisement that Brian Stock's After Augustine considers 'the evolution ofthe Western reader and Western reading practices from antiquity to the REVIEWS143 Renaissance' suggests a breadth of topic never claimed by the author. Rather, the book considers themes in the history of reading in seven concise chapters in which Stock's stated aim is to explore how reading and meditation were practices fundamental to the spiritual exercises meant to reshape ethical values, and thus 'became part ofthe subject's inner experience'(i). The first four chapters on 'Reading and Self-Knowledge,' 'Ethical Values and the Literary Imagination,' 'Later Ancient Literary Realism,' and 'The Problem of SelfRepresentation ' work well as a group. They address topics such as the ethical values of both reading and the composition of 'interior narratives' and the relationship of self-knowledge to self-representation in ways that are important for the study of narratives of the self in periods where autobiography and biography as we know them did not exist. Especially valuable are Stock's reflections on how 'questions of reading, writing, and intentionality were instrumental in defining the boundaries of an independent notion of the self'(59) and his descriptions of the transformation of late ancient spiritual exercises into the meditative reading of the Medieval...