Faith, Ethics and Church: Writing in England, 1360–1409 by David Aers

Abstract

REVIEWS that the two disks have different manipulation features (scroll bars in the second volume replace a facility for grasping and dragging in the first), but a positive innovation in Volume Two is a mini-window which allows one to keep track of one’s position on the page when focusing on an enlarged detail. This kind of facsimile resource will, I believe, provide an entirely new quality of access to manuscript sources, and eventually, when we have enough digitized manuscripts, will supply the infrastructure necessary for next-generation research. Of course, there is and never will be any substitute for examining material books. But the availability of electronic facsimiles such as this—especially if they are one day made available on the Internet—will facilitate comparison of books held in farflung repositories. It will open up the possibility of systematic and largescale comparisons of hands, layouts, and other paratextual features, and lay the groundwork for writing new chapters in the history of the medieval book. The new histories of the medieval book that will be enabled by the new technology will very likely problematize the editorial agenda of the Electronic Archive. The Archive avowedly begins where the Athlone project left off, and, while the editors expect to revise their basic editorial assumptions and hypotheses during the course of the editorial process, they have not set out to challenge the principles of the predecessor editions . Although the project is innovative in its use of the new technology as a medium for publication, its aims and objectives are informed by what are arguably still print-centred editorial paradigms and concepts, including, crucially, the concept of the definitive authorial text. Possibly it will not be the edition but the facsimile resources provided by the Archive that will in the end prove to be the project’s most significant and enduring contribution to Middle English textual scholarship in the electronic age. Wendy Scase Department of English, University of Birmingham David Aers. Faith, Ethics and Church: Writing in England, 1360–1409. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000. Pp. xii, 153. $60.00. David Aers examines the relations among faith, ethics, and Church in the works of Chaucer, Langland, the Gawain-poet, Gower, and Wyclif. 357 ................. 9680$$ CH16 11-01-10 12:36:45 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER He rejects the notion that medieval Christianity is a single, unified faith without contentions or stresses (Robertson’s ‘‘quiet hierarchies’’). He disclaims the notion that ‘‘faith and spirituality were divorced from practical reason and ethics, divorced, that is, from the tasks of building communities which could at least make human flourishing possible’’ (p. 4). Aers insists that faith ‘‘involves and involved collective praxis in determinate historical communities,’’ and so we must and can ask who profits from these particular concepts of God, for people become ‘‘faithful followers of Christ not as abstract individuals but as members of a specific community where faith, ethics, Christology, and ecclesiology are bound together’’ (p. 6). He objects to representations of medieval faith that suggest that reason is opposed to faith; it is not the case that those with faith must lack reason for believing as they do. This does not mean that faith can be demonstrated, yet faith is ‘‘a thinking accompanied by searching’’ (as in Aquinas). As Aers examines his authors, he returns to a small group of subjects: allusions to the sacrament of the altar or their absence, the construction of Christian communities or its absence, and the question of whether faith and reason are opposed in these texts. The first of these assumes importance in the context of Lollardy. The second is important given the discourses about the ideal church in view of the various critiques of the contemporary church. And Aers usually draws on Aquinas to adjudicate issues regarding faith and reason. Aers suggests that we ‘‘need to approach particular articulations of faith as voices in a complex conversation. Just as a ‘‘ ‘self’ only emerges in ‘webs of interlocution,’ just as human identity only emerges with ‘reference to a defining community,’ so medieval versions (plural) of faith belong to particular webs of interlocution that assume particular communities and particular historical circumstances with their own sometimes...