Authors of the Middle Ages: English Writers of the Late Middle Ages, vol. 1, nos. 1–4 ed. by M. C. Seymour

Abstract

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ity, and P(JU)er is worth careful reading; I would not willingly reread chap­ ters 2-5, but I shall go back to the rest of the book with interest and in the expectation of further enlightenment. A. C. SPEARING University of Virginia M. C. SEYMOUR, gen. ed. Authors ofthe Middle Ages: English Writers ofthe Late Middle Ages, vol. 1, nos. 1-4. Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate Publishing, 1994. Pp. v, 248. $72.50. This volume contains four essays that focus chiefly on the biographical facts about several medieval English authors, Sir John Mandeville (by M. C. Seymour), John Trevisa (David C. Fowler), William Langland (Ralph Hanna III), and Thomas Hoccleve (J. A. Burrow). Each sixty-page essay surveys the life and provides a bibliography and (except in the case of Mandeville) a list of sources that document the life. Each essay also has been published separately in paperback. Seymour's opening contribution first examines the "facts" about Mande­ ville's identity, then the "fictions." In the facts category are issues Seymour takes up one by one and draws conclusions about-the French versions of the Travels, date of original composition, provenance, nationality of the author, what the book says about Egypt and the Holy land, its geography, and its orthodoxy. His conclusions are that the unknown author was a native French-speaker who wrote the book ca. 1357 in a large Continental library, an ecclesiastic, a fluent reader of Latin (but someone ignorant of Arabic and Greek), a curious reader of others' narratives about the world (including those that supported his belief in circumnavigation), and, fi­ nally, "a man who had never travelled to the lands he describes" (p. 27). Many students of Mandeville would agree with most of Seymour's deter­ minations, although his review of opinion on some issues could have more clearly noticed contrary voices (e.g., Metlitzki's arguments for Mandeville's familiarity with Egypt). Seymour next turns to the "fictions"--certain in­ terpolations made in various versions of the book, apocryphal works attrib­ uted to Mandeville/Jean de Bourgogne, de Bourgogne's reported epitaph, and other later accretions to the complex Mandeville legend. In the first part of the essay Seymour is given to saying that "Mandeville" is "false" for 294 REVIEWS alleging this or that (e.g., "his claim to have used an astrolabe on his journeys is worthless" [p. 24}), but in the rest of it (from p. 25 on) he acknowledges that "Mandeville" is a character and a narrator created by the author (which allows us, I believe, to understand that the astrolabe is there as an icon of the far traveller). Seymour plausibly suggests that the author of the Travels might have been a contemporary French translator and an­ thologizer of travel writings,Jean le Long, who for various reasons, a num­ ber of which Seymour discusses, made "Mandeville" appear to be English. That is why Sir John Mandeville is included in this volume on English writers. Fowler's investigation of what is known about the life of Trevisa treats Trevisa's origins, his time at Oxford, his installation as Vicar of Berkeley, his years in Gloucestershire, and his writings. His links to Wyclif and his associations with other learned men at Quenehalle, Oxford, are carefully detailed, as are the library resources that may have supported Trevisa in his translations of the Bible and other works. Hanna's essay on Langland returns us to the kinds of problems Seymour encountered in examining the author of "Mandeville." Of the four contrib­ utors, Hanna is the most thoughtful concerning the difficulties of saying much with certainty about the lives of medieval authors. We are not really sure who "William (or Robert) Langland" was or whether he wrote Piers Plowman (or some of it, or some versions of it), but Hanna reviews dates and locations of manuscripts of Piers as one way of establishing some infor­ mation about "Langland." He also believes that "from the poem one can extract further bits of information, all in some way or another subject to scholarly contention, which form a represented biography" (p. 149); these bits draw our attention to seven...