Imagined Romes: The Ancient City and Its Stories in Middle English Poetry by C. David Benson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Imagined Romes: The Ancient City and Its Stories in Middle English Poetry by C. David Benson Nicholas D. Brodie Benson, C. David, Imagined Romes: The Ancient City and Its Stories in Middle English Poetry, University Park, PA, The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2019; hardback; pp. 216; R.R.P. US$89.95; ISBN 9780271083209. This fascinating study of Rome, as imagined by Middle English poets, is a work that both identifies and fills a significant scholarly gap. This gap, as the author characterizes it, is a ‘systematic study of ancient Rome as a major theme in the works of late medieval English poets’ (p. 1). This book answers that gap adroitly. Exploring relationships between Latin source texts and Middle English [End Page 220] poetry, divergent perceptions of ancient and contemporary Rome, paganism and Christianity, and more, the author succeeds in his objective ‘to make the case for how much is to be gained from more careful attention to the subject’ (p. 144). The book is divided in two parts, broadly addressing texts that focus on Rome in the first two chapters before turning to texts that have considerable Roman content in Chapters 3–6. The first part begins with the Stacions of Rome, a poem that derives from the Latin Indulgentiae ecclesiarum urbis Romae, itself focused on Rome’s Christian heritage. Benson convincingly argues that the Stacions of Rome, full of churches and relics and indulgences, act as ‘a textual substitute for Rome rather than a guide to it’ (p. 23), wherein the city becomes a conduit for grace by way of imaginary pilgrimage. Benson turns to the Metrical Mirabilia in his second chapter, giving considerable attention to the textual relationships between various poems and their Latin precedents in a series of works with more explicitly antiquarian elements focused on ancient Rome and its marvels. Benson shows how an English poet’s interpolation into Mandeville’s Travels, which he characterizes as ‘unparalleled in Middle English poetry’ (p. 46), makes a case for the superiority of Christian spirituality over pagan Rome’s technical achievements. In the book’s second part, Benson turns to some poets who are ‘better-known and more accomplished’ (p. 59) and surveys the role that Rome played in their narratives. John Gower is first, in whose Confessio Amantis Benson sees Rome being used to illustrate exemplary instances of good government that ‘is successful in good times and resilient in bad’ (p. 73). Geoffrey Chaucer follows, and here Benson draws attention to the ways that Roman power was often deployed against women. ‘Nowhere else in Middle English poetry do Roman men in power treat good women with such unrelenting nastiness’ (p. 81), he suggests. In William Langland’s Piers Plowman, in contrast, Benson suggests that Rome serves as a focus for the poet’s concern with virtue. Benson argues that the episode concerning Trajan and Gregory helps the poet resolve some of the conceptual difficulties bequeathed to medieval thinkers by the ‘dual legacy of ancient Rome, pagan and Christian’ (p. 119). John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes is the focus of Benson’s final chapter, which brings the book to its conclusion. The Fall of Princes is here shown to treat Rome with more antiquarian accuracy than the preceding three poets and with a degree of literary sophistication that ‘may be unexpected in a poet so easy to underrate’ (p. 121). Benson’s suggestion that Lydgate ‘articulates an Augustinian view of ancient Rome as the paradigmatic earthly city’ (p. 143) is an interesting notion, which highlights the overall benefit of this close study of the imagined Rome(s) of Middle English poetry. Rome, as Benson shows, could and did mean many things. It was a repository of stories, but also could be an object of imaginary pilgrimage. Rome exemplified virtues and vices, connections, and contrasts. As Benson so effectively illustrates, the poetically imagined Rome was rarely just a setting. [End Page 221] Nicholas D. Brodie Hobart, Tasmania Copyright © 2022 Nicholas D. Brodie