Gender and the Chivalric Community in Malory's 'Morte Darthur' by Dorsey Armstrong (review)

Abstract

MLRy 100.2, 2005 477 Dane is, by training, a Chaucerian, and readers of this book may be familiar with his earlier forays into medieval textual scholarship (notably, Who is Buried in Chaucer's Tomb? (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1999)). The most compelling chapters of The Myth ofPrint Culture are the ones on Chaucer: one raising questions about Manly and Rickert's reliance on Skeat's Student's Chaucer (an argument that has implications for a larger debate about the editorial priority of the Ellesmere or Hengwrt Manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales); the other, a critique of the recent Electronic Chaucer put out on CD-ROM by Cambridge University Press. In these essays, as well as in several other more general chapters in this book, Dane raises important questions about such key concepts in textual criticism as 'variant', 'wit? ness', 'issue', and 'edition'. Is a variant any difference in the text, or is it only a set of meaningful differences (and just who is to determine what differences are meaningful )? How can we distinguish between a variant and a mistake? Can we really define a witness as a contemporary or near-contemporary version of a text? Why is Caxton's second edition of the Canterbury Tales (1484) a 'witness', while Thynne's 1532 edi? tion in the Works of GeoffreyChaucer is not? Are we left, Dane queries, not with a definition of a witness in a hard and fastway,but rather only with an intuition ofwhat a non-witness may be (see pp. 127-28) ?'Issue' and 'edition' are similarly difficultterms, used with seeming confidence by bibliographers. The fact that every single copy of an early printed book is unique (changes in mid-press run, uncaught errors, shifts in typeface, changes in paper stock, and so on) may make it hard to classify a body of individual objects as part of an issue or an edition. We are left,Dane implies, not with functional definitions of these terms, but rather with parameters of possible usage (for example, effectivelysaying that an issue or an edition is the set of all individual books whose difference from one another fails within a certain circumscribed range). Dane is a great rhetorical provocateur, and chapters with such titles as 'Twenty Million Incunables Can't Be Wrong' and 'The Zen of Collation' may bother or amuse, depending on the reader's mien or on which side of the Atlantic he or she resides. Sometimes he may overstate his case and leave himself as vulnerable to critique as he himself finds his contemporary scholars (as I think he does in the chapter on Bentley's Milton and Terence). At other times, his fascination with detail may lead him into antiquarianism of an almost Victorian calibre (witness his researches into mummy 'paper', leading him into enquiries into the Egyptian rag trade, the railroad, an outbreak of cholera in the state of Maine, and Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad). Still, everything is stimulating. The revisionist textual critic Randall McLeod (aka Random Cloud) finds in Dane's book what he calls, in the jacket blurb, an 'Emperor has no clothes' quality to its arguments. Dane has stripped away the fineryof biblio? graphers and critics, often showing the self-contradictory quality of their methods. Books such as his will keep the discipline of the history of the book from becoming too dry or, dare I say it, too imperial. Stanford University Seth Lerer Gender and the Chivalric Community in Malory's 'Morte Darthur \ By Dorsey Arm? strong. Gainsville: University Press of Florida. 2004. viii + 272 pp. $59.95. ISBN 0-8130-2686-5. The premiss of Dorsey Armstrong's study is that the 'particular construction of gen? der in Malory's text is critical to any attempt to engage with its narrative project' (p. 1). The book is well researched, and Armstrong writes clearly without excessive jargon. However, her arguments for the centrality of gender throughout the Morte Darthur are not strong. 478 Reviews Armstrong contends that in Malory's version the Arthurian realm is undermined and eventually destroyed by 'the progressively degenerative results produced by the model of gender installed as a foundational support of the chivalric community...