Certain Sermons or Homilies (1547) and A Homily against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion (1570) ed. by Ronald B. Bond

Abstract

As Jordan points out, it is possible for two critics to offer convincing inter­ pretations that contradict one another: Though each view has much to recommend it, can both be right? Students of the poem [the Book of the Duchess] have long been tempted simply to beg the real questions and answer yes, both are right and the greatness of the poem lies in its very capacity to contain, if not resolve, contradictions. But the poem deserves finer analysis, and if we find ourselves repeating contradictory answers to the old questions, it is perhaps because we have learned all we can from those questions. (54) Jordan’s analytic and descriptive method, on the other hand, is open to more or less objective verification. Other readers can count digressions, or figure out ratios of story to rhetoric, or attend to shifting voices in the passages and texts that Jordan has discussed and in those he has not — although of course other readers may disagree with him and with each other about the definitions and contents of those categories. Still Jordan’s arguments and his evidence for them elicit and deserve the most serious consideration. The book has an index but no bibliography. I hesitate to complain because it is, on the whole, notably considerate in the demands it makes on its audi­ ence. It is lucid and a pleasure to read. It can be recommended to under­ graduates : they may find it a trifle dry, but like the rest of us they can benefit from its warnings about the limits of interpretation and its demonstration of the ways in which rhetorical analysis can be appropriately and productively applied to Chaucer’s poetry. j o a n n e c r a ig / Bishop’s University Ronald B. Bond, ed., Certain Sermons or Homilies (1547) and A Homily against Disobedience and Wilful Rebellion (1570) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987). xii, 259. $35.00 In this critical, though not definitive, edition, Professor Bond aspires to pro­ vide us with a “practical” version of “some important texts of the English Reformation” (ix). The twelve homilies of the 1547 volume are viewed as “prime examples of English Christian humanism” (ix-x) and as anticipating the shape of the English Reformation, preceding as they do both the Book of Common Prayer (1549) and the Thirty-nine Articles (1563). The rationale for including the later (and separately published) Against Rebellion varies: at one point we are told that its near-hysterical tone “ throws into relief the less shrill protestantism” (ix) of the 1547 collection; elsewhere it is characterized as “a work that distils what is sometimes called the Tudor myth” (44), though 469 the precise terms and shape of that myth are unspecified. This conjunction of works may seem, therefore, somewhat arbitrary; and there is no mention of a parallel edition of the second (1563) book of homilies, to which Against Re­ bellion was appended from 1571 onward. (We are promised a companion volume which will examine the homilies of the current collection as back­ ground to the literature of the period.) In terms of editing, the aim is “ to present an old-spelling text that is, sub­ stantially, Edwardian” (46), using (in the case of Certain Sermons) 1547 as the foundation text and introducing corrections based on evidence from one or more of 1549, 1559 (the first edition under Elizabeth), and the folio of 1623. The fairly numerous revisions of 1559, overseen by the Queen herself and introduced “for the better understandyng of the simple people,” are here handled effectively: instead of cluttering the text-page itself with interpola­ tions or footnotes, Bond has presented these changes in the textual notes that follow each homily, where they may be consulted easily enough by interested students, while allowing the 1547 homilies to be experienced “in a form close to that in which they were read and heard in mid-sixteenth-century England” (46). For Against Rebellion the base text is that first published (presumably) in April or May of 1570, collated with an edition later in 1570 and with the 1623 folio. In these and related editorial matters (punctuation, paragraphing, indica­ tions of scriptural citation or...