Arboreal Politics in the Knight's Tale

Some time between 1390 and his death in 1400, Chaucer served as a substitute forester in North Petherton, Somerset.1 Although it probably required little more than occasional desk work, and although it was the last and worst-documented of Chaucer's many dalliances with the administrative machinery of late-fourteenth-century England, the position affirms the persistence into the reign of Richard II of the decadent Norman royal forest system.2 While it is uncertain whether art imitated life or vice versa in each case, a number of Chaucer's literary works mention forestry and make use of its specialized vocabulary.3 In the Book of the Duchess, for example, the poet employs a slew of technical terms over the course of Octavian's hunt (344–86).4 The Knight's Yeoman and (as will be shown) the Friar's Tale's devil-yeoman are especially important in the present connection because they are foresters, albeit of a more practical variety than the historical Chaucer. In what follows, it is argued that the Friar's Tale, by a series of dramatic ironies, critiques the royal forest system in which Chaucer was (or was to become) a minor official. The first section outlines fourteenth-century English forest history and its reception in poetry of the period; the second presents a reading of the Friar's Tale, with special attention to the figure of the devil-yeoman and the tale's satire on the royal forest and other administrative systems.As the Crown's economic stranglehold on lands designated “forest” weakened toward the end of the fourteenth century, the English nobles grew bolder in cultivating local protocols for their woodlands, giving rise to a rich hunting culture that would come to symbolize the British leisure class. At the same time, the relaxing of royal forest law drove into the literary mainstream the figure of the tricksy forest outlaw, whose popular cognomen “Robin Hood” was to be the occasion for one of British literature's most successful fantasies.5 In addition to the historical convenience of a forester Chaucer, then, the thirty or so years of his literary career stand at the crossroads of the two great moments in medieval forest history: on the one hand, the final gasps of the Norman forest scheme; on the other, the appropriation of the hunt as an aristocratic prerogative. The convergence of the two moments in the late fourteenth century fostered an imagined English forestland, endlessly refashioned in tales and technical literature, in which the peasant, the outlaw, the forester, and the noble hunter meet and quarrel.6 Chaucer's forests, too, for all that they may seem a shamelessly exploited motif, provide a backdrop to characters who act out “the growing self-consciousness of the romance tradition.”7The last quarter of the fourteenth century witnessed a series of crises in and around the royal forest. As aristocratic as well as popular opposition to the Norman forest system grew keener, Richard and his deputies continued to cede forest rights to the barony in exchange for fealty, a trend that had gained momentum since John first began large-scale strategic disafforestment with his Great Charter of 1215.8 A tacit coalition sprang up between the Crown and the barony with respect to hunting rights, so that by the time of the Peasants' Revolt in 1381, it was the abolition of the hunting privileges of the elite, and not of the royal forest, which formed a part of the rebels' demands.9 On a number of occasions, the political controversy surrounding the Norman forest touched the historical Chaucer. John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster, for whom Chaucer wrote The Book of the Duchess, upon returning from Spain in 1389 found his dukedom split by a fierce dispute between denizens of Yorkshire and his forest officials, over hunting rights in his forests, parks, and chases there.10 In 1390, Chaucer was robbed of his horse and official monies by forest vagabonds at a place in Surrey referred to in court proceedings as “le fowle ok.”11 A third circumstance even more firmly implicates Chaucer in forest history and the history of hunting literature. In assuming the North Petherton forestership, Chaucer substituted for John of Gaunt's nephew, Edward of Norwich, 2nd Duke of York, who would later (ca. 1406–1413) pen medieval England's most ambitious hunting treatise, The Master of Game, a liberal Englishing of Gaston de Foix's Livre de Chasse.12 Nor was Edward unfamiliar with his successor's literary oeuvre. In the prologue to his manual, having humbly laid out the purpose of the work, he produces by way of an epigraph a couplet misremembered from Chaucer's prologue to the Legend of Good Women.13Chaucer's minor role in the decline of the Norman forest administration having been delineated, the forest setting in the Friar's Tale gains a new depth. For even if it was composed before his appointment to Petherton, Chaucer's reworking of the devil-and-advocate fable engages with the contemporary reality of the royal forest bureaucracy that would eventually draw him into its orbit. Neither the vaguely threatening groves of the Knight's Tale, nor the impromptu hunting zone of the Book of the Duchess, nor the flatly wrought “Forestes, parkes ful of wilde deer” (V 1190) imaged forth by the Franklin's Tale's magician, the forest of the Friar's Tale is composed to feel more historical—if less remarkable—to a contemporary audience, because the tale takes aim at foresters as well as summoners. To be sure, Chaucer's “grene-wode shawe” (III 1386) owes much to the romance tradition, but the Friar specifies at the beginning of his tale that the summoner was the wiliest chap “in Engelond” (III 1322), and that the archdeacon who supervised him “was dwellynge in my contree” (III 1301). Furthermore, the Friar's remarks in his Prologue and the Summoner's irate interruptions make clear to the pilgrims that the fable's true target is a flesh-and-blood summoner, opening the door for a second analogy between the Friar's summoner and an historical one. Finally, the use of technical terminology throughout the tale adds to the impression of historicity.14While Chaucer's trajectory in the literary-critical imagination from “court poet” to “city poet” has bypassed the natural world,15 recent scholarship has turned to his bureaucratic obligations more generally,16 and for good reason: the historical Chaucer could have boasted along with the Roman de la Rose's Fals-Semblant that “Trop sai bien mes abiz changier,Prendre l'un e l'autre estrangier:Or sui chevaliers, or sui moines,Or sui prelaz, or sui chanoines,Or sui clers, autre eure sui prestres,Or sui deciples, or sui maistres,Or chastelains, or forestiers;Briement je sui de touz mestiers.”(lines 11187–94)“I know well how to change my guises, pick up one and put down another: now I'm a knight, now I'm a monk, now I'm a prelate, now I'm a canon, now I'm a clerk, at another time I'm a priest, now I'm a disciple, now I'm a master, now a castellan, now a forester; in short, I do all the jobs.”17 In this extensive list of occupations, officials comprise a decided majority. Although, of course, Chaucer did not attain to all of these professions, his work as an esquire, a controller of customs, a clerk of works, a forester, and so on, doubtless contributed to the panoramic view of society famously explored in the frame narrative of the Canterbury Tales. Seven of Chaucer's pilgrims are officials in some capacity (the Friar, the Knight's Yeoman, the Man of Law, the Manciple, the Pardoner, the Reeve, and the Summoner). To some extent, Chaucer's diverse stints as a bureaucrat must have contributed to the timeliness and complexity of the Friar's Tale's satire on corrupt officialdom.18Given the importance of hunting and the royal forest in late-fourteenth-century English political history, it should not be surprising to find two foresters among Chaucer's creations.19 The pride of place granted to the Knight's Yeoman in the General Prologue testifies to a type and a profession indispensable for a complete “compaignye/Of sondry folk” (I 24–25).20 The Yeoman is outfitted with clothing and accoutrements proper to a gamekeeper, a private forester serving a lord. He certainly appears to be ready for whatever the woodlands throw at him. He wears a green coat and hood, and a brooch imprinted with an image of St. Christopher; he carries a bow and a sheaf of peacock arrows, a bracer, a sword, a small shield, a dagger, and a horn with a green shoulder-strap. One is assured that his aptitude is commensurate with his gear: he looks after his arrows “yemanly” (I 106), and “Of wodecraft wel koude he al the usage” (I 110). The apparent approbation with which Chaucer the pilgrim pronounces these earthy words—“yemanly,” “wodecraft”—reflects the new aristocratic associations of venery and forest husbandry. The implication is that only a very well-to-do knight possessed the means to retain a skilled forester to patrol his woodlands and serve as “master of game” on his hunts.21 While describing in his treatise the all-important “undoing” (disembowelment) of the slain deer, Edward of Norwich distinguishes the hunter's competence from that of the “woodman” along similar lines and in almost identical terms: But on þat oþir syde, if þe lorde woll haue þat dere vndone, he þat he byddeth, as byforn is seide, shuld vndone hym þe moste wodmanly and clenly þat he can. And ne wondreth ʒou noght þat I say wodmanly, for it is a point þat longeth to a wodmanes craft; and þough it be wele fittyng to ane hunter for to kunne done it, neuerþelatter it longeth more to wodmancraft þan to hunters. And þerfore, as of þe manere how he shuld be vndo, I passe ouere lyghtly, for þer nys no wodman ne good hunter in Englonde þat þei ne can do it wele inow, and wele bettir þan I can tech hem.22 Thus the byzantine legal infrastructure governing the foresta regis and the forestarii regis, which had reached its zenith with Henry II's 1184 Assize of the Forest, has been transmuted by Chaucer's time into a complex aristocratic craft predicated on a technical protocol. The admirable competency exhibited by the Yeoman is yeomanry itself, the sum of the duties a forester performed for his lord. Chaucer rounds out the description of the Yeoman with the wry observation that “A forster was he, soothly, as I gesse” (I 117), as though it needed saying. The irony detectable in this line demonstrates the fourteenth-century forester's ready recognizability in literature, at least in ideal terms. For if the symbolical tidiness with which the Yeoman makes his entrance is fueled by anxieties about the practical problem of distinguishing between foresters, outlaws, and locals in England's woodlands, Chaucer's portrait shows, at the very least, how a forester ought to appear.Aside from the ominous “frenges blake” that adorn his hat, the devil-yeoman of the Friar's Tale is a perfect miniature of the Knight's Yeoman, right down to his “gay” comportment and his “arwes brighte and kene”: And happed that he saugh bifore hym rydeA gay yeman, under a forest syde.A bowe he bar, and arwes brighte and kene;He hadde upon a courtepy of grene,An hat upon his heed with frenges blake.(III 1379–83) Green trappings are stock symbols of forest-goers, and so they need not indicate any specific connection between the two characters, beyond the typological one explored below.23 While critics have noted the devil's similarity toRobin Hood24 and to a hunter,25 the ensuing conversation between the yeoman and the summoner makes clear that the devil is posing as a “bailly” (official), a fact acknowledged more than once by both characters (III 1396, 1419, 1427–28, etc.). Clad in green and mounted, the demon most closely resembles the type of middling forest official known as a “riding forester.”26 It makes sense that a devil should impersonate an official in a tale devoted to: (1) the proper execution of an office; (2) the temptation to embezzle; (3) lordship and servitude; (4) economies infernal, divine, and human; and (5) “the ultimate justice of the social dispensation.”27 Rather than providing a colorless foil for the summoner's comeuppance, the devil's disguise adds its own specific layers of irony to the tale's moral.28 By dressing the devil as a forester—a departure from all known sources and analogues—Chaucer pits one “bailly” against another, elaborating a critique of administration that subtly reshapes the conceit of the devil-and-advocate fable.The primary ironic effect of the devil's trappings is the implicit comparison of foresters to devils. Read as a forester, the demon takes on the aspect of an official supervising his domain, as he inquires after the summoner's itinerary with perhaps more than friendly interest: “‘Wher rydestow, under this grene-wode shawe?’/Seyde this yeman, ‘Wiltow fer to day?’” (III 1386–87). At the same time, this is also Satan's minister watching for his moment to snatch away a sinner. When the devil lists for the summoner's edification the disguises available to demons (“Somtyme lyk a man, or lyk an ape,/Or lyk an angel kan I ryde or go” [III 1464–65]), he not only intones the superficiality of fleshly existence, but defines the contours of an administrative program.29 The summoner's downfall lies in his inability to pierce the superficial reality by correctly identifying in the forester's garb the signposts of demonhood: the black-fringed hat, the green gear, the residence “fer in the north contree” (III 1413).30 Crucially, both levels of reality represented by the devil-yeoman contain an administrative system (the royal forest and the administration of heaven and hell), and the summoner worsts the green-clad stranger in both of them, to his mortal peril. While attempting to impress a forester, the summoner proves crueler than a devil.Congruent with the irony that the summoner is crueler than a devil is the irony that he is crueler than a forester. Foresters' reputation for abuses of power had its roots in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the heyday of the forest regime in England. In 1279 the denizens of Somerset forest, where Chaucer was to hold his forestership, made so bold as to bring an action against their local forest deputies for official malfeasance.31 The form of their complaint is similar to accounts of corrupt clerical officials in the century to follow, and the Somerset foresters' alleged abuses resemble nothing so much as the Friar's summoner's “purchasyng” (III 1449): they leverage privileges against their own profit, they extort on pain of frivolous litigation, they steal outright. By the fourteenth century, the ponderous machinery of the kingdom-wide Forest Eyre had given way to ad hoc commissions of oyer et terminer and sporadic local “perambulations” to reaffirm the bounds of the forest.32 The rapid decline of the royal forest arrangement (including the desuetude of the forest courts in the early fourteenth century) accounts for the lack of similar formal complaints during Chaucer's lifetime. As the scale of corruption in the forest system shrank along with the royal forest itself toward the end of the fourteenth century, the figure of the corrupt forester hardened into a literary trope. At the same time, many other administrative systems—for example, the ecclesiastical courts that summoners served—were growing in power and complexity. Thus the Friar's Tale juxtaposes an old problem official with a new one, implying an analogy between the two.33The third irony arises from the summoner's incorrect assumption that a forester must be as evil as he himself is. As the Friar explains at the beginning of his tale, the summoner's vices flourish because of his relatively unsupervised position in a bureaucracy (“His maister knew nat alwey what he wan” [III 1345])—superadded to which, one might say, is the personal hatefulness that sends this particular summoner to hell. But the most immediate cause of the summoner's predicament is his overestimation of the forester's corruption. His dumbfounded reply to the devil's revelation of his true identity (“I wende ye were a yeman trewely./Ye han a mannes shap as wel as I” [III 1457–58]) signifies not only ‘I thought you were a young man: a person, like me,’ but also ‘I thought you were a bailiff: you look just like me.’ Under the first interpretation, the summoner is shocked to learn that the stranger is not of this world; but, as critics of the tale often note, his subsequent behavior suggests that he continues to mistake the demon for a mortal. Under the second interpretation, he is shocked to learn that the stranger is not a corrupt official, a partner in crime, as he had presumed. Because the devil-yeoman's account of his infernal duties so closely resembles the stereotype of the corrupt forester, the summoner fails to grasp the superficiality of the disguise. His demonological inquiries reveal that he understands “feend” (III 1448) as an exotic subgenre of the term bailly, and his primary interest in the discussion is to glean “[s]om subtiltee” (III 1420) that he can apply to his own endeavors. The first question he puts to the yeoman (“Han ye a figure thanne determinat/In helle, ther ye been in youre estat?” [III 1459–60]) reveals a mind working to incorporate new information into a familiar system, to subsume demondom in the same estates typology that comprehends summoners and foresters. Later, the devil makes his most explicit threat on the summoner's soul, and the summoner responds with at the of with his by in a of this than he was on ryde I with it be so that this nat a yeman, is ful The summoner's his to the forester's by his yeman and it also his of the with the he to mistake the for the for implicit in the of the tale, but is made explicit to the by the Friar's opening description of the is the specific into which the devil At a time the of the royal forest administration was very much on the would have the irony that the summoner fails to for the of a forester less corrupt than he, and to himself a term for a forest official. Chaucer the of yeman to point up the summoner's between the forest system and the infernal of which the devil-yeoman is a means of these ironies, the tale pits against one another two of In to the Chaucer the devil in an to the summoner's in its position its administrative The specific of a forester on the of this in the fourteenth century, and in the literary of same that whom Richard and as a of the of a new type of literary with to the forest, by rapid disafforestment and the of forest throughout the fourteenth In the Friar's Tale a similar type of is a for the Friar's on To his I nat been out of his han of no of is the point that so the His so been of the the out of [III not only to the Friar's of with of his but also to the of his By rights, a summoner ought to serve the of his in of the and may his the Friar a system at all levels by the down his in the of their and their the two pilgrims in a about and beyond the question of the of which of course, they also continues his of into his own The Summoner's is all a in his proper the he had in his [III His is by his and (III that of official at for the the and him a a with the of in upon diverse manere many a I the The Summoner's is where the Friar's summoner is The formal over the of the the Summoner's a of his own the of that has the place of bureaucratic the Friar's tale with over Chaucer the for the between the summoner and the forester. Although the satire in the disguise of a about the role of the fourteenth-century forest the tale's of the is The devil's that been ful and ful is to and is ful and perhaps official in the forest. or not the from the poet Friar's Tale may well have been composed before historical Chaucer could have the reputation of the he during the last of his When the devil on to the summoner that by I I al that by or by to I al my he the stereotype of the corrupt forester, and his own As it the devil will need no or to of the summoner's in all this very the demon with an His on (III not found in any of the tale, on and its could be as one is to that he has to means at other and under other his of corruption in comparison with the summoner's in the of an the devil an important in the as he been to his (III as the devil's the summoner's by so both of the corrupt forester the in the of forest history and the rise of bureaucracy in England, the summoner's about demondom a growing contemporary with the Friar's Tale a of the of the devil-and-advocate the summoner's to his on a it a departure from the of good and As in the tale's sources and Chaucer's devil not or his respect for him as an By the devil as a forest official, Chaucer one than his sources in an administrative than a for the The devil's as demon and yeoman a comparison between and and if Chaucer to or to have his Friar that clerical administration by its the irony of the royal forest as its reveals the outlines of a much more critique of When the devil-yeoman the summoner to of (III Chaucer not only makes clear the Friar's point that it is in the of the that han (III he also for his the narrative of on the to and for a working of the and infernal that takes the form of an and in whose image is to its

Logging bans as means of trying to control deforestation and other wrong forestry practices has been in use for along time in many parts of the world. It is evinced by command and control regulation. Recent cases of interest are in Asia Pacific countries. This mainly involved logging bans in natural forests. In the case of Kenya, cutting in natural forests was banned many years back. What is of interest lately is the near total ban, which includes a cutting moratorium on plantations. Kenya's case is unique in the sense that the ban is a presidential decree. The aim of this paper is to explain the relationship between the ban and law and policy, and to show that imposition of a logging ban without due consideration of existing forest law and forest policy does not enhance the well-being of the forest plantation. This research was conducted through an examination of the Forests Act and Forest Policy and interviews with forestry officers and saw millers. Other forms of secondary data were also examined. Results indicated that there is lack of convergence to the law and policy, as the President does not derive his powers from the forest law and policy. There are associated impacts on plantation forestry. These are both positive and negative. Long term unintended effects are negative and this is a lesson that we can learn from this form of command and control in forestry when applied to plantations. Stakeholders should learn that adverse political solutions do not sit well with good plantation forest management.

Reviewed by: Wisdom and Chivalry: Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Medieval Political Theory Robert Emmett Finnegan S. H. Rigby. Wisdom and Chivalry: Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Medieval Political Theory. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Pp. xvi, 329. €119.00; $169.00. Wisdom and Chivalry is a deeply researched and closely argued piece of historical criticism. Stephen Rigby chooses as his analytical tool for The Knight's Tale Giles of Rome's De Regimine Principum, a mirror for princes composed circa 1280 for the future Philip IV of France. Giles, a student of Aquinas, synthesizes the political/religious ideas of his—and Chaucer's—day with respect to the personal and public qualities a ruler ought to possess, and demonstrate. The De Regimine, which shows the [End Page 365] influence of Aristotle and Plato, Cicero and Seneca, survives in some 350 manuscripts, mostly Latin, some vernacular. John Trevisa translated it into English; Thomas of Gloucester, Richard II's uncle, possessed a Latin copy. It is, then, an appropriate touchstone for a study of this sort. Indeed, a reader/listener who had internalized Giles's ideas might well find that “in idealizing Duke Theseus . . . The Knight's Tale seeks to offer a confirmation of the ‘dominant’ ideology of late medieval England” (285) and that “Duke Theseus embodies the virtue which political theorists demanded a ruler should possess as an individual, as the head of a household, and as a sovereign ruler” (276). Rigby structures his analysis in terms of this tripartite division: Part I (“Ethics: The Good Rule of the Self”) deals with Theseus's personal ethics; Part II (“Economics and Politics: The Good Rule of Others”) shows these personal ethics in public action; Part III (“The First Mover and the Good Rule of the Cosmos”) views Theseus's rule of self and others in the wider context of Jupiter's/the Christian God's dominion over the universe. Rigby, then, evaluates Theseus's conduct from the microcosmic-personal to the macrocosmic-universal. There is no ambiguity here. By every measure, and in all circumstances, Theseus comports himself as Giles, and political theorists roughly contemporary with Chaucer— Dante, Boccaccio, John Gower—think an ideal ruler should. We learn, for example, that the duke had every right to send Palamon and Arcite to prison forte et dure and set the “pilours” on the fallen Thebans; he had shown his banner on the march against Creon, and this gesture counted to Chaucer's contemporaries not only as a formal declaration of war but also as an indication that little, or no, quarter need be expected. Later we discover that Saturn, whose intervention concludes the strife in heaven, can be understood as representing the wisdom of old age. We are also told that Theseus's First Mover lecture is informed not only by Boethius but by current ideas of the Christian God's control of the universe and everything in it. There are numerous such interpretations, all positive; Rigby consistently sees the duke's actions as ideal and exemplary. But this need not necessarily be so, even for a reader steeped in the De Regimine. A Gilesian reader might recognize Theseus's right to conduct himself as he does on the Theban battlefield, but yet question the charity of his so doing. Given the dynamics of the poem, such a reader might well find it odd that Jupiter, who attempts to resolve the contention in [End Page 366] heaven—“Juppiter was bisy it to stente” (2442)—signally fails. If our Gilesian could trace the semantic range of “bisy” and “stente,” he would find, perhaps, the terms suggesting that Jupiter worked for a solution over a significant period of time and became worried and distressed when he did not succeed. Saturn's malevolent self-characterization embodies the worst violence depicted on the walls of the temples of Mars, Venus, and Diana. Our Gilesian reader might find an in bono interpretation here a very large order indeed, and discover little in the text to warrant an assertion that “the agency of Saturn, in resolving the conflict between Mars and Venus, can actually be seen as an instrument of Jupiter's power” (269). Again, our Gilesian might...

Since the Middle Ages, the vast forests of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania served as the hunting areas of Lithuanian rulers. Grand Dukes frequently moved with their entourage between forest manors, supplying the court with venison. One of the fundamentals of the Lithuanian code of laws was the protection of big game and Grand Duke’s forests, which became royal forests after the union between Poland and Grand Duchy of Lithuania in 1385. A special type of service people, osoczniks, were responsible for guarding forests and helping during royal hunts. Białowieża Primeval Forest (BPF) is an example of such forest, in which the long-lasting tradition of royal hunts and conservation from the fifteenth to the eighteenth centuries has led to creation of a specific cultural landscape of a royal hunting garden (ogrody do polowań). Such gardens were large parts of the forest (5–10 km2) surrounded by a wooden fence, incorporating different forest habitats with a part of a stream or small river. Big game (European bison, moose, red and roe deer and wild boar) were driven and closed inside ogrody before each royal hunt. Although the techniques of the hunt changed in time, the original idea of hunting garden persisted until the last royal hunt in BPF in 1784, when at least two such areas were present there. The long-lasting maintenance of a fenced area with an artificially created glade and bower inside the forest created a specific cultural landscape, which started to decline only after the political fall of Poland in 1795. One of the hunting gardens (Kletna) has disappeared since then, but the other (Teremiska) served as a Russian game park in the nineteenth century. Since 1929, a part of it was incorporated into the Polish breeding reserve for European bison.KeywordsWild BoarEighteenth CenturySixteenth CenturyCultural LandscapeFourteenth CenturyThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

1?6ARTHURIANA Elizabeth scala, Absent Narratives, Manuscript Textuality, andLiterary Structure in Late Medieval Enghnd. The New Middle Ages. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002. Pp. xix, 284. isbn: 0-312-24043-0. «59-95Poststructuralist literary and cultural theory and their vocabularies appear more and more frequently in medieval studies. Elizabeth Scala's book on the 'absent narratives' in late Middle English texts is an attempt to bring these frameworks and reading strategies to medieval texts. Her approach is informed both by poststructuralist (especially psychoanalytic) literary theory and manuscript studies, a productive mixture; but in the final analysis the book is tilted towards the theoretical pole. Scala's starting point, developed convincingly in her Preface and Introduction, is the analogy she finds between the structure of late medieval literary texts as determined by the stories that they do not, cannot, or will not tell (the title's 'absent narratives'), and the culture of manuscript textuality that produced them (where manuscripts relyon exemplars and authority depends on previous texts, the Origins') (xvii). The three spaces where she locates her examinations are thus textual history, the history ofcritical/editorial reception, and the text itselfas a literary work ofart. She uses a basically psychoanalytic framework and vocabulary in the interpretations; gender, representation, and narratological considerations are also important foci. Treating the 'absent narratives' (untold stories which are nevertheless signalled as lacking) as 'repressed,' Scala's theoretical metaphor is that narratives are like subjects, in an explicitly Lacanian sense, whose unconscious operations affect their meaning (what they 'say') and their structure (what they 'do') (12). The discussion of this analogy leads into a series of case studies, interpretations of Chaucer's Book ofthe Duchess, 'Squire'sTale' and 'KnightsTale,' Sir Gawain andthe Green Knight, Gower's Confessio Amantis, and Malory's Morte Darthur. Scala's interpretations are sensitive and fresh, integrating but also taking issue with a variety ofrecent theoretically minded approaches, such as Stephen Nichols's work about manuscript textuality and the 'manuscript matrix.' Her reading of Sir Gawain in terms of the discourse that substitutes the story acted for the (lacking) story told, the rational world for the uncontrollable, repressed and marginalized magical world figured by Morgan Ie Fay, stepping into the gap at the end, certainly throws new light on a number ofdetails. So is the approach to the 'Squire's Tale' as both figuring and sidestepping the telling of the incest story of Canacee, or the interpretation of the 'Knight's Tale' as romancing (and controlling) the Amazons and the feminine. But whenever Scala reaches more specific theoretical questions, so promisingly treated in the Introduction in the context ofmanuscript textuality, a specific 'medieval discourse,' and in terms of representation, the theoretically minded reader is frustrated. All we ever get at such points is that the text's concern is with the slippages and non-transparence of language, or with 'problems of representation'; a deeper analysis ofwhat exactly the texts tell us about this 'medieval discourse,' or how they redefine frameworks of representation is never given. Likewise, expectations as to the theorizing of manuscript textuality in detail as a place where such shifting signifying practices operate, and as to the particulars of REVIEWSIO7 these practices, are not fulfilled either. The theory of the absent narratives, as the repressed material ofthe textual unconscious that return and resignify in repetitions and substitutions, produces an application ofa set oftheoretical concerns to specific texts and their specific meanings in the case studies; it is not an all-embracing theory ofthe 'medieval discourse,' signification, and meaning production in general in late medieval England. But if poststructuralist thinking has taught us anything, it is that all-embracing theories are always suspect. One ofthe three spaces where the examination is situated, the manuscript context, is also somewhat less emphasized than one would expect from the Introduction. This is a book rather for the theorist and literary scholar than the codicologist. A wonderful exception is the chapter on Gower, where the manuscript's marginal Latin commentary (also its illustrations) is shown as an alternative discourse to the text: instead of limiting its meaning, this alternative discourse further elaborates it and contributes to the author/narrator figure's self-fictionalization. But the last...

New Perspectives on People and Forests

Reviewed by: The Gift of Narrative in Medieval England by Nicholas Perkins Walter Wadiak nicholas perkins, The Gift of Narrative in Medieval England. Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture Vol. 39. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021. Pp. xi, 270. isbn: 978-1526139917. $120. While medieval English romances have inspired readings in terms of 'the gift' since at least the early 90s, Perkins ambitiously reads the entire genre as structured around an ideal of generous exchange. In this remarkable study, the gift figures as nothing less than the founding gesture of romance and the impulse that drives these stories forward, in the process drawing readers themselves into the cycle of generosity and giving rise to responses in the form of new texts. Perkins concedes near the outset that such an approach might seem 'dreamily optimistic' (p. 31), yet the book feels bracing and even revelatory in its insistence that we attend to the ethical work of a genre that has often been dismissed as mere ideology. Chapter One reads a group of early romances (about a figure called Horn) as enacting the delay that makes the gift as opposed to the commodity. In romance, Perkins observes, it is often 'in the very delay or frustration of the return, in the gift's continuing journey, that narrative suspense and pleasure … is contained' (p. 44). The argument here is structuralist in its emphasis on the larger narrative picture, but Perkins adroitly zooms in to focus on, for instance, how the Romance of Horn plays on the idea of Horn as both a found object on the beach (le truvé el graver) as well as an inscribed or graven textual object, with a plausible pun on truver as poetic making (p. 33). Chapter Two extends the argument to the romances housed in the celebrated Auchinleck manuscript, though the links here are somewhat looser and more thematic, as Perkins admits. The last half of the chapter explores Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a story in which, as Perkins reminds us, 'the forme to the fynisment foldes ful selden', and in doing so he challenges what he sees as overly determined readings of the poem's many gifts and games. Perkins' writing here and elsewhere is frequently delightful, as when he describes Gawain, setting out for what he thinks will be his doom all trussed up in his sumptuous armor, as 'gift-wrapped for delivery' (p. 98). Those buoyant touches suit an argument that registers awareness of the darker possibilities lurking in romance but ultimately invites us to read the genre in recuperative terms. Chapters Four and Five, dealing with Chaucerian texts, feel a bit less fresh, but here, too, there is nuanced interpretation, as when Perkins remarks upon the limits [End Page 110] of our knowledge about the small keepsakes that Troilus and Criseyde exchange (as opposed to the public and ostentatious gifts—e.g., that heart-shaped brooch!—that tend to draw readers' attention). The notion of 'distributed agency,' first introduced in Chapter Four, helps Perkins to complicate the boundary between person and object in ways that bear upon gender-focused readings of, for instance, Chaucer's Knight's Tale, while Chapter Five outlines an intriguing notion of performative speech-acts as gifts, a return with interest on previous uses of this kind of 'citational' language. Since this is a book about how narrative returns with interest in subsequent retellings, both within and between texts, it makes sense that the final chapter, on Lydgate's Troy Book, is the richest in both close reading and theoretical heft. Hector's 'cyborg corpse' (p. 212), preserved by King Priam (via a weirdly intricate system of gold tubes) in a bid to raise the morale of the Trojans, becomes in Perkins' incisive reading an 'aureate body' (p. 228) that speaks both to the elaborate quality of Lydgate's own writing and to the blurred lines between people and things in Lydgate's narrative (this blurring being, as Perkins reminds us, a hallmark of the gift). That troubling of the boundaries between the human and the non-human is central to Perkins' effort to imagine what he calls a 'speculative anthropology,' one that might allow us to...

The distinction between the and the trees is fundamental to this study, for the royal of medieval England was a complex institution with legal, political, economic, and social significance. To protect the beasts of the and their habitat, initially for the king's hunting and later for economic exploitation, an elaborate organization of officials and courts administered a system of forest that was unique to medieval England. The subject can first be studied in detail in the records and chronicles of the Angevin kings, which reflect the restless activity of Henry II and his growing corps of officials that led to the expansion of the area designated as royal forest. At its height in the thirteenth century, an estimated one-fourth of the land area of England and its riches came under the special jurisdiction of law. Barons whose holdings lay within the royal were restricted in their use of the land, and the activity of all who lived or traveled in the was circumscribed. Until the institution of new taxes overshadowed the economic importance of the and the king divested himself of large areas of in 1327, the extent of the royal forest, with its special jurisdiction, was often a source of conflict between king and barons and was a major political issue in the Magna Carta crisis of 1215. This is the first general history of the royal system from its beginning with the Norman Conquest to its decline in the later Middle Ages. The author pays special attention to the development of law alongside common law, and the interrelationship between the two types of law, courts, and justices. The preservation of extensive unpublished records of the courts in the Public Record Office makes possible this intensive study of the legal and administrative aspects of the royal forest; chronicles and the records of the Exchequer, among other sources, shed light on the political and economic importance of the royal forests in medieval England. The author's ultimate objective is to show the influence of the royal upon the daily lives of contemporaries-both the barons who held land and the peasants who tilled land within the royal forests.

Historically, Royal Commissions have come to play a significant role in the formulation of forest policy in British Columbia. The report of the Pearse Commission, Timber Rights and Forest Policy in British Columbia, released in late 1976, offers the prospect of another significant turning point in forest policy, if its recommendations are accepted by the Provincial Government. However, whether the recommendations will be adopted is in doubt; first because the Commission has spanned a change of provincial government, from NDP to Social Credit; and second because its major policy recommendations seek to reduce the forest-tenure rights of the more powerful segments of the forest industry. The Commission's recommendations to introduce flexibility into the tenure system by reducing the almost perpetual security of timber supply to holders of Tree Farm Licences and of 'quotas' in Public Sustained Yield Units are likely to draw the fire of what has become a highly concentrated industry. Its recommendations to increase competition in the bidding for timber are also likely to suffer the same firepower. While these recommendations may provide some gains in efficiency, especially over the longer term, they are largely concerned with income distribution questions, between government and the private sector, and among firms within the forest industry. Other suggested changes are more likely to meet with approval from the current government and from industry. These are aimed at simplifying and streamlining forest policy and administration. Forest-policy issues, like other policy issues, are usefully analysed from two perspectives, from that of resource allocation or efficiency, and from that of distribution or equity. Recommendations involving efficiency gains are usually more likely to gain acceptance. Those involving distribution are more intractable.

This chapter focuses on the dynamics of international forest policy development and adoption. Specific topics covered include the following: two major changes in thinking about the main norms and principles guiding forest governance (a change from a governmental approach to a multi-actor and multi-level governance approach, and a related change from hard forest law to a more soft forest law approach); main policy issues in forest management; and key themes in forest policy (one that concerns the notion of the need to change the institutional structure of forest policy and to develop new arrangements for forest governance, and other major themes that concern either environmental issues or socioeconomic issues).

Annual review of Swiss forest policy 2014 Swiss forest policy in 2014 was marked by the passage of the Federal Council's message and draft of an amendment of the Forest Law, which was also treated by the Council of State's Commission for Environment, Spatial Planning and Energy and by the Council of State itself. This revision affects more than 20 articles of the current Forest Law. Despite these numerous alterations, the revision has not caused major debates. The forest-relevant parliamentary interventions decreased drastically in 2014, but since the beginning of 2015 a countertrend is notable. The forest budget remained practically the same as in previous years. The number of federal court decisions in relation to the forest sector has stayed small. Yet there are increasingly significant cantonal court decisions in this domain. In terms of broader forest policy, the public administration has mainly undertaken new standpoints regarding spatial planning and energy policies.

Reviewed by: Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England by Julie Orlemanski Rebecca Krug Julie Orlemanski. Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. ix, 333. $69.95. Julie Orlemanski's Symptomatic Subjects demonstrates that representations of physical bodies as "symptomatic"—that is, subject to both decay, death, and sickness and, also, to interpretation—were central to late medieval English imaginative writing. The book ranges with great energy over well-known works such as Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Henryson's Testament of Cresseid; marches through readings of less-familiar texts, including tales from the Gesta Romanorum, Hoccleve's Series, and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament; and runs through excerpts from medical works by Arnau of Vilanova, John Arderne, Guy de Chauliac, and Roger of Parma. The ambitious scope of the project—bodies, medicine, and causation—is somewhat overstated but exciting. Through her dynamic readings of texts that feature descriptions of bodily processes, Orlemanski shows that late medieval literary writers had come to see literary production as a space in which embodiment, textuality, and signification could be explored. Both bodies and written texts had become subject to interpretation and narration in late medieval England. Orlemanski explains that her book "tells the story of how embodied subjectivity was narrated in its entangled relation to the world in the era of medicine's unprecedented textual vitality. In that, it offers one approach to the phenomenology of medieval selfhood, or, what it was [End Page 429] like, within the era's mix of discourses, to reflect on both having and being a body" (2). The book traces patterns of causation and embodiment and draws a picture of late medieval textual etiology as a force that can be observed at work in literary writing. It defines etiology as concerned with "projects of explanatory invention" that explore causation in multiple ways. Like late medieval readers, whom the book's author describes as "bricoleurs of etiology" (3), Orlemanski herself gathers up literary writings representing physical ailments to create a collage of late medieval literature and its relation to medical/literary causality. The etiology that Symptomatic Subjects finds most interesting is generic. Following two synthetic chapters that trace a broad history of medieval medicine, the book is composed of six chapters focused on literary works. These chapters develop a narrative about the representation of bodies and generic expression in the period. As this is the heart of the book, I first outline chapters 3 through 8. The discussion of genre in these chapters is underwritten by recent scholarship on the link between narration and medicine. It is rooted, first, in the appearance in medical discourse of satire. Taking up a point from Douglas Gray's analysis of Henryson's "Sum Practysis of Medecyne" linking jargon and satire, Orlemanski produces readings of Henryson and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament that underscore the difficulty of reconciling the linguistic and the material. From satire she turns to exemplary stories, which she sees as functioning like medicine because both involve judgments concerning relationships between the general and the particular. Such adjudication, she observes, was subject to revision and, in some cases, incoherence. This, then, becomes the subject of a section about romance conventions in Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Henryson's Testament of Cresseid. Both texts focus on dying or diseased bodies and can be seen as doing so in relation to reflections on narrative closure. She turns then to the narration of self in Hoccleve's Series and Margery Kempe's Book. The Hoccleve chapter enacts Orlemanski's claims most effectively as it demonstrates that the Series can be seen to wrestle with "the self's inability to master its own materiality and the signifier's incapacity to guarantee its own meaning" (220). Her discussion of Kempe focuses on the Book's representation of involuntary crying, discussed in all its physicality, and movements between first- and third-person narration. The outline above demonstrates the complexity of the book. Because this is the case, I describe two chapters in detail below to provide a sense [End Page...

REVIEWS dialects and genres. Benson has already prepared a printed lemmatized concordance to The Riverside Chaucer, and other scholars are working with him to prepare similar concordances for Langland, Gower, Hoccleve, and others. Benson's witty, self-deprecating essay manages both to convey a great deal of information and to suggest how critically useful such work can prove. Computers have long promised to provide reliable and nonimpressionis­ tic means of stylistic, lexical, morphological, and syntactic comparisons between reliably attributed texts and texts whose authorship is unknown. Stephen R. Reimer reports on research in progress in which sets of three 500-word selections are analyzed from each ofthe following texts: The Siege ofThebes, The Fall ofPrinces, Confessio Amantis, and Chaucer's Knight's Tale. Each was tested for word frequencies, relative word lengths, rhyme-word patterning, and other morphological features, using LitStats, the Oxford Concordance Program, and TACT. The textbase at the time he drafted his report was too small for meaningful results, but he is encouraged to think that tests can be devised for distinguishing authorial fingerprints for attri­ bution studies. Thomas Bestul describes ongoing work, under the general editorship of Robert Correale, to provide a replacement for the old Bryan and Dempster Sources and Analogues ofChaucer's Canterbury Tales (1941), especially his portion on The Monk's Tale. He makes a powerful case that a printed one- or two-volume set will be expensive to produce, that, even so, some sources and analogues are too long to be usefully printed, and that it would be most useful to scholars to prepare a hypertextually linked elec­ tronic textbase. One can only hope that he will convince his collaborators of the wisdom of that mode of publication, for it will at once be more complete, more usable, more easily updated, and far less expensive than a printed text. The volume closes with a thoughtful "Afterwords" summary statement by Patricia Eberle, an organizer of this unusually fruitful conference. HOYT N. DUGGAN University of Virginia SETH LERER. Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late­ Medieval England. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. Pp. xii, 309. $39.50. Lerer's aim in this book is twofold: to analyze how Chaucer was interpreted by fifteenth-century readers and to show how the responses ofthose readers 229 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER formed Chaucer's identity as author, "laureate," and "father" of English poetry. The broad selection of readers he studies includes not only the poets, from Clanvowe through Skelton, who adapted Chaucer, but also the scribes, editors, and anthologizers who transmitted his work. According to Lerer, these readers were awed by what they perceived as Chaucer's ''tmas­ sailable authority," and they defined their relationship to Chaucer by cast­ ing themselves in the roles of Chaucerian characters who were subject to the abuse of readers or to the authority of fathers, sources, or auctores: the Clerk, the Squire, Geffrey, and Adam Scriveyn. By dramatizing these rela­ tionships of authority and subordination in his writings, Chaucer, in effect, provided the tools for constructing his own legend. Though steeped in New Historicist methodology, Chaucer and His Readers is, in certain respects, curiously old-fashioned. Given the abundant interest in "Chaucerians" manifest in the publications and conferences of the past six or seven years, it seems odd that Lerer should feel compelled to justify his subject matter to those who might accuse him of having "dis­ placed the great for the ephemeral, the lasting for the transitory" (p. 5). His defensiveness stems from the conviction he shares with generations of scholars that he is indeed treating second-rate writers, disciples "admit­ tedly unworthy of [Chaucer's} mantle" (p. 3). For Lerer, Lydgate, Clan­ vowe, and Hoccleve are "poetasters" (p. 119) laboring under the weight of Chaucer's authority: "As children to the father, apprentices to the master, or aspirants before the laureate, those who would read and write after the poet share in the shadows of the secondary" (p. 3). Of Lydgate and other members of the early-fifteenth-century "Chaucer cult" he writes: Their "myths of performance," ... and the creation of the narrative personae who enact them, are a far cry from the...

Hunting in wooded regions was a major part of the lives of kings and their followers from early medieval times. Under the Norman kings huge areas were deliberately set aside for this purpose. It gave rise to a rich body of documentary evidence and literary works, playing a noteworthy role, too, in medieval lore and legend. The use of the woods for pasture was not normally precluded by this usage. However, economic forces were increasingly to conflict with the preservation of so much woodland and the forest law that was so restrictive, especially the requirement for additional land for agriculture. Deer-parks were enclosed and forests diminished in size and in later historical times the latter were seen primarily as a source of timber. Hunting itself, however, continued but in a very different form, moving to the rural countryside over most of lowland England until it faced present-day legislation.

The history of Bialowieza Primeval Forest (BPF) experienced a pivotal moment with the royal hunt by Alexander II in 1860. The impact of the hunt was to trigger a gradual change in BPF management (creating a game reserve, purchasing deer, exterminating predators, restricting logging) that ultimately transformed it into the private hunting ground of the Russian Tsars; a process completed in 1888. There was a major shift from the incremental moves towards commercial forestry driven by nineteenth-century scientific forestry towards being a hunting ground based on principals of German “rational” game management. The changes that the era of Great Reforms brought in the 1860s, sparked conflicts between former state peasants and BPF administration over traditional forest use. At the same time, as this change was sweeping through the forest interest in the natural world and in new ideas such as evolution and natural selection were emerging throughout Europe and North America. With this new enlightenment, the forest became subject to increasing interest and scrutiny from a more educated society. A consequence of this change was that the forest appeared regularly as a topic in publications devoted to nature and forestry. Furthermore, the region was visited by prominent artists and writers and perceptions and ideas relating to the forest and its European bison emerged from that time and some remain with us today.