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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England ed. by Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway Kathleen Smith Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway, eds. Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. Pp. vii + 341. $74.95 cloth, $14.95 CD. This volume in honor of Anne Middleton collects essays on a variety of approaches to medieval literary style, with an emphasis on the works of Chaucer and Langland. Written in the spirit of the festschrift, a number of the essays critically engage with both Middleton’s work and the practice of new formalism in medieval literary studies, offering a welcome contribution to the discipline. As the editors Frank Grady and Andrew [End Page 314] Galloway caution: medievalists began to turn their attention to the formal elements of style long before the movement of new formalism supposedly began. The volume nevertheless assembles a collection of essays with the goal of pursuing the literary as such. The book is divided into two sections, with the first group of essays focusing on vernacular literary style as it employs and often departs from Latin literary style. The second half focuses more exclusively on English vernacular expressions of style. The volume has been published by Ohio State University Press as part of the series Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture, which includes theoretically inflected works on animal studies, gender, law, translation studies, and politics. The essays largely exercise, to borrow Levinson’s phrase, a kind of activist formalism, carefully attuned to historical context but never dominated by it in the practice of literary analysis. Rita Copeland’s excellent discussion of the shift in the reception of Horace’s Ars poetica from the Middle Ages to the early modern period inaugurates the collection. The Ars poetica, she argues, moved from the status of grammar school manual to universalizing classic of critical theory because of a shift in its use and therefore its perceived status. Once other style manuals, such as Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s Poetria nova, became more frequently employed in the classroom, Horace’s poem was dislodged from the practical and repetitive doldrums of schoolwork. For this reason, the Ars poetica could be “rediscovered” as a humanist classic in the sixteenth century since it was no longer connected to the lower status of grammar school composition manual. Copeland’s essay, which builds on her earlier work on rhetoric and pedagogy, offers valuable insight into discussions of style by examining the reception of theories of style. Ralph Hanna employs a similar methodology for thinking about genre in “Speculum Vitae and the Form of Piers Plowman” and also offers a compelling response to Nicholas Watson’s influential theory of vernacular theology. While Watson had emphasized the growth of a culture of censorship at the hands of Archbishop Thomas Arundel after 1409 as the major factor in shaping English vernacular writings about theology, Hanna suggests that perhaps simply a change in tastes might be the factor that best explains why catechetical works such as the Speculum vitae fell out of favor with writers. These texts had exhausted the possibilities for writing about virtues and vices within the genre of catechetical writing and Hanna argues that writers like Langland sought new [End Page 315] forms for thinking about practical or applied religious issues. Hanna’s approach offers readers a theory that should spark further debate on the genres of religious writing that emerged in England in the later Middle Ages. Katherine Zieman’s essay, “Escaping the Whirling Wicker: Ricardian Poetics and Narrative Voice in The Canterbury Tales,” in addition to advancing excellent analyses for those who work in the field, also gives an overview of scholarly debate on character and narrative voice in Chaucer that would be especially useful to graduate students. She responds to Middleton’s idea of “public poetry” in Ricardian literature, focusing on the rhetorical strategies Chaucer employs to create an impression of a fully realized character. The Man of Law’s Tale offers moments of narrative interruption that call attention to the narrator, and in doing so, create a sense of character. These moments of interruption, however, should also...