Later Medieval English Literature by Douglas Gray

Abstract

MLR, 105.2, 2010 521 Readers may thus end with mixed feelings. There is no great problem with the mystery plays or the pageants and romances. Their conspicuously public nature means they suffer less by emphasis on social context, so the discussion of them cannot be faulted. But it is a big problem for a work as complex as Sir Gawain and theGreen Knight. Here the author misses all sorts. It is curious that his topo graphical studymakes nothing of 'I>eholy hede' (Holywell, Flintshire) or Gawain's journey thence in thedirection of Storeton (a seat of the Stanleys). We hear nothing of the castles ofDisserd or Diserth andMont-hault orMold, both near Cheshire and surely suggesting the name of Hautdesert. Absent, too, is reference to the consistent verbal parallels between Sir Gawain and writing by Sir John Stanley (who ismentioned briefly on page 172). A focused studywould thus have concentrated on linkswith him, dropping the irrelevant details of the Scrope-Grosvenor trial. The dialect of Sir Gawain is that of theCheshire-Staffordshire border: Stanley was (it seems) brought up at Stanley, in north-west Staffordshire. The Gawain-poet knew court life intimately: Stanley was in 1399 Controller of theRoyal Household. The poet was an expert huntsman: Stanley was master forester of theCheshire forests ofMacclesfield (where Gawain met the Green Knight), Delamere, and Mondrum. The poet had a perfect com mand of French, and knew southern France: Stanley fought on the king's service inAquitaine. The manuscript of the poem contains theGarter motto: Stanley was the only Knight of the Garter at this date in the Cheshire region. Barrett has, in short,missed a gigantic opportunity; since themore one analyses Sir Gawain and theGreen Knight, themore it appears (in the cliche of journalists) to be from a source very close to Sir John Stanley indeed. University of Navarre, Pamplona Andrew Breeze LaterMedieval English Literature. By Douglas Gray. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2008. xiv+712 pp. ?65. ISBN 978-0-19-812218-0. In 2010 Douglas Gray will be eighty; and Later Medieval English Literature comes as the harvest of a wonderful old age. It contains the wisdom of a life spent in teaching medieval literature, and will be read and consulted for generations to come. Its authors skill appears not only in his judgement but in the organization of somewhat unruly material. The book has five sections: a 150-page introduction that sets the scene; prose; poetry; Scottish writing; and drama. These break down into twenty-three chapters. The first section ranges over the medieval cosmos, mentalities, manuscripts, print, and oral and visual culture. The second presents the Pastons, Malory, Caxton, Lord Berners, and religious writing, but also the less considered jestbooks and 'practical' handbooks. Poetry takes inHoccleve, Lydgate, Chaucerian verse, lyric, romances, Hawes, Barclay, and Skelton. Scottish writing provides us with 120 pages, notmerely on the 'big three' ofHenryson, Dunbar, and Douglas, but on anonymous poetry and prose. (The author has the refreshing gift of bringing inmuch minor writing forour assessment.) The volume ends with four 522 Reviews chapters on themystery cycles,morality plays, and interludes. Grays sympathy for medieval thought and feeling is there at its finest.He is a powerful champion of theYork and other dramas, responding eloquently to theirmythical presentation of comedies human and divine. LaterMedieval English Literature thusmarks the conclusion of a literarycounter revolution, the rehabilitation of the period's English writing. It emerges not as thin stuffor waning or not-so-good-as-Chaucer, but as a vital and major achievement in its own right. Gray performs an act of revaluation for theMiddle Ages as dramatic as that done by C. S. Lewis in 1954 with his English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Gray is quieter and less rhetorical than Lewis, but writes with equal distinction and perhaps more persuasively. The clarity of his prose is aided by the lack of footnotes, although each chapter ends with a listof books and papers cited. This magnificent volume, towering above so much that comes one's way, is a noble monument fromOxford, city ofmonuments. Of course, its imposing struc ture has the odd hairline crack. On pilgrimages to StWinifred's well...