Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England ed. by Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway (review)

Abstract

FRANK GRADY AND ANDREW GALLOWAY, eds., Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. Pp. 341. isbn: 0-8142-1207-7. $74.95.Rarely does a collection of essays hold together as well as this one-assembled in honor of Anne Middleton. Evoking in its title her essay 'Aelfric's Answerable Style,' the collection seeks to address 'the idea of the literary' (again a reference to one of Middleton's seminal essays, 'The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II') by modeling how careful attention to formal, stylistic, and aesthetic matters in medieval texts might guide our scholarship.The essays are clustered into two sections. The first centers on Latin literary theory as it is manifest in vernacular literary practice; the second zeroes in on vernacular literary work itself, and what that practice can tell us about the literary ideas that inspired its production. The majority of essays in the first section are on Langland; those in the second half range more widely.In a thunderous opening move, Rita Copeland contributes a revisionist history of how Horace's Ars poetica factors into the efflorescence of medieval literary theory, showing how that text transitions from being an elementary schooltext to a 'global theoretical authority' (16) partially through the emergence of medieval artes poeticae, including Matthew of Vendome's and Geoffrey of Vinsauf's works. By synthesizing, refracting, and simplifying Horatian principles into de facto handbooks, these medieval writers freed Horace's text from its role as an elementary text and opened it up to the kind of readings it would have in the Renaissance, namely, as a 'poet's poem and a standard of literary judgment' (30).Wendy Scase's essay shows how Langland's shifting poem, precisely because of its complex structure at every scale and its dizzying channeling of Latin rhetorical practices, becomes a vernacular authority on composition for other, later authors- namely, those in the so-called Piers Plowman tradition. In Scase's view, Langland's poem was valuable not just for its content, but also because it allowed vernacular poets to calque onto the vernacularized rhetorical and structural moves that Langland makes. As she puts it, '...Piers transmitted to the Piers-tradition poets a vocabulary for aligning their vernacular practice with that of the schoolroom' (50).Building on Scase's modeling of how Langland acts as a kind of fulcrum between Latinate and vernacular literary practices, Traugott Lawler points up a series of instances in the poem in which Langland seems to be slyly and craftily translating Latin set-phrases, quotations, and tropes into English. Examining these unannounced translations allows us to see that Langland's poem has its origin decisively in Latin literary traditions, and in the many occulted voices that that tradition spun out into late Middle English literary culture.The problem of multiple voices shapes Katherine Zieman's essay on House of Fame and The Canterbury Tales. For Zieman, the House of Fame's famous wicker cage becomes a figure for thinking through the ever-thorny issue of character vs. subjectivity in Chaucer studies: the wicker cage evokes the press of 'common voices' (79) that Chaucer then creates in his larger work, experimenting all the while with the spectrum that joins 'open' personae to 'closed' personae. In its wicker cage-like experimentations with voicing and complex intertextuality, Zieman argues, the Tales have a great deal of tangency with more overtly 'public' poetry, such as Piers Plowman.Katharine Breen's essay turns our attention, via a close and careful reading of the Anima scene in the B-text of Piers Plowman, back to the idea that Langland's poem is heavily embroidered with Latin formal tropes and devices. In this case, Breen argues that the visual didactic form of the Speculum theologiae is a Latinate tool for abstract thought that Langland ably translates not only into the vernacular from Latin, but also into words alone from a combination of words and images. …