Form and Reform: Reading Across the Fifteenth Century (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Form and Reform: Reading Across the Fifteenth Century Amanda J. Gerber Form and Reform: Reading Across the Fifteenth Century, ed. Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press 2011) xii + 222 pp. Research about fifteenth-century literature has traditionally focused on the socio-political nature of writing during the tumultuous end of the Middle Ages. Shannon Gayk and Kathleen Tonry’s essay collection, Form and Reform: Reading Across the Fifteenth Century, encourages its readers to look beyond this critical rut to note both the formalist and reformative aspects of fifteenth-century literature. Incorporating articles about authors such as Osbern Bokenham and John Capgrave, Gayk and Tonry develop the critical field beyond its customary focus on John Lydgate and John Metham. While Lydgate and Metham remain ever-present throughout the book, the contributors make a conscious effort to broaden the scope of fifteenth-century literary studies, even extending the period to include John Skelton—whose poems cross well into the sixteenth century. This collection thus aspires both to integrate new texts into the fifteenth-century canon and to introduce new interpretive methods for analyzing them. Tonry’s introduction postulates that previous scholarship about fifteenth-century texts provides limited conclusions about a diverse and complex literary period. Initiating her discussion with Lydgate, Tonry acknowledges that most perceptions about this era are predicated on this one English monk. She then moves through the history of formalism studies, laying the groundwork for the book’s methodology. The first two essays explicitly pursue these formalist paradigms, looking at both readers and epistolary styles in relation to the material form of two fifteenth-century manuscripts. Jessica Brantley’s article, “Forms of Reading in the Book of Brome,” analyzes the appearance of the words on the page of the Book of Brome’s Abraham and Isaac play, relating the drama’s physical relationship to the context of the Brome manuscript in which it is found. Brantley argues that the rubricators’ marks for the Abraham and Isaac play indicate that it was intended for private readers well versed in typological exegesis. The next entry, Andrew Cole’s “The Style of Humanist Latin Letters at the University of Oxford: On Thomas Chaundler and the Epistolae Academicae Oxon. (Registrum F),” takes a more expansive approach to [End Page 197] fifteenth-century formalist criticism, attempting to redeem humanist Latin and to revise A. G. Rigg’s arbitrary delineation of 1422 as the end of the period. To elevate and lengthen Latin humanism, Cole suggests that the dullness trope, which modern criticism has discussed about fifteenth-century English vernacular poetry, was actually more pronounced in humanist Latin letters. Focusing particularly on the letters of Thomas Chaundler in the Epistolae Academicae Oxon., Cole argues that these works combined classicizing forms of expression with supplicating appeals in a manner more advanced than anything seen just a few decades before Chaundler wrote them. The next three studies address forms of devotion, beginning with Karen A. Winstead’s “Osbern Bokenham’s ‘englische boke’: Re-forming Holy Women.” Winstead compares Bokenham’s thirteen original saints’ lives, called Legends of Holy Women, to his version of Jacobus de Voraine’s Legenda aurea in order to illustrate how Bokenham revises his thinking about the efficacy of teaching and preaching. Winstead proposes that Bokenham’s altered convictions correspond with a larger group of thoughtful clergy who reevaluated their beliefs and the meaning of orthodox Christianity in response to Reginald Pecock’s heresy. Rather than reveal how devotional writers influence each other, Shannon Gayk’s essay analyzes John Capgrave’s Life of Saint Katherine as a representative of the general tenants of fifteenth-century vernacular invention. Gayk’s “‘Ete this book’: Literary Consumption and Poetic Invention in John Capgrave’s Life of Saint Katherine” examines alimentary metaphors that were common in rhetorical texts to demonstrate how Capgrave collects exegetical, rhetorical, and poetic devices to note their limited value—thereby requiring readers to work to produce literary meaning. The last essay in this section about devotion, Rebecca Krug’s “Jesus’ Voice: Dialogue and Late-Medieval Readers,” juxtaposes literary conversations with Jesus from The Fifteen Oes, Margery Kempe’s Book, and the first English vernacular translation of the...