Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages (review)

Abstract

Amtower's study is "limited to what may be called the age and influences of Chaucer" (12). Her title may mislead by underplaying that limitation, but it does capture the ambitiousness of Engaging Words, as Amtower responds to theoretical positions expressed by Foucault, Ong, Iser, Altieri, Greenblatt, and Bakhtin; assimilates twenty years of research into the material history of books by such scholars as Lillian Randall, Jonathan Alexander, Michael Camille, and Paul Saenger; integrates studies of the ethics of grammar and rhetoric by J. B. Allen, A. J. Minnis, and Rita Copeland; and engages the interpretations of Chaucer offered by an agonistic host of sophisticated interpreters, from Carolyn Dinshaw to C. D. Benson, Lee Patterson to Sheila Delaney. A much larger book would seem to be required, but Amtower defends her hypothesis that a "reflexive relationship existed between reading habits and the shaping of identity" (2) with enviable efficiency, in just five suggestive chapters.