D. Vance Smith, Arts of Dying, Literature and Finitude in Medieval England. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2020, 10, 299 pp., 2 b&w ill.

Abstract

D. Vance Smith’s new book is an unusual one in several ways. The Acknowledgments, often placed first in academic books, are relegated to a position between the last chapter and the end notes. Meanwhile, the Preface acknowledges that the author’s chief debts are to the psychologist and psychiatrist who, along with his wife, kept him alive as he struggled with the medieval poems about death. For Smith was also struggling with his own undiagnosed bipolar disorder, which “nearly brought me [i.e., him] to an end.” The licensed psychologist he saw regularly is the person to whom he dedicates the book; he likens her to Reason in the medieval French Roman de la Rose. Writing shortly after the suicide of a prominent Princeton economist, he reflects on the “stigma” of seeking help in one’s workplace and on the irony, captured in words he quotes from William Langland’s paraphrase of Augustine’s Confessions, that many people know much about other things who know little about themselves (ix, x)