Medieval Studies for J. A. W. Bennett (Aetatis Suae LXX) ed. by P. L. Heyworth

Abstract

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER christ" as a synonym for anything vaguely apocalyptic. Emmerson convinc­ ingly demonstrates throughout the book that the tradition is rich and many-sided. But he is equally convincing in his demonstration that the tradition is specific. Once again without polemical tone, Emmerson warns against those who use Antichrist to mean the devil, or merely someone who has sinister connections. Instead, as he summarizes for us in the far-from-tautological conclusion ofthis book, "Antichrist is Antichrist-not Satan, not the pope, but a man with devilish connections who will come for a short time in the future to deceive and persecute the righteous, kill the prophets Enoch and Elias, and finally be destroyed before the Second Advent of Christ" (p. 237). Those who make the acquaintance ofthis Antichrist through Emmerson's careful scholarship may well find their reading ofmany medieval texts enriched. Chaucer himselfcomes to mind as one author who may well have drawn on thistradition in ways that still remain to be discovered in figures such as the Pardoner. Because of such possibilities, this study is not only significant but exciting as well. RONALD B. HERZMAN State University ofNew York P. L. HEYWORTH, ed., MedievalStudiesfor]. A. W. Bennett (Aetatis Suae LXX). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981. Pp. xi, 425. 12 plates. £27.50. The death of]. A. W. Bennett onJanuary 29, 1981 has made this book, which was intended as a Festschrift for his seventieth birthday, into a memorial volume. It is, I think, the kind ofFestschrift and the kind of"In Memoriam" thatJack Bennett would have wanted. The book is-beauti­ fully-printed in his beloved Oxford, edited by a former pupil and close friend who now teaches in Canada, and packed with fifteen essays repre­ senting a fairly wide range ofthe topics that interested him (the only major lacuna is the seventeenth century, but it would be impossible to cover the whole range of Jack Bennett's interests, and the editor has wisely chosen the Middle Ages). A short, sympathetic biography and a few pages on "The Learned Adviser" (of Oxford University Press) by Dan Davin open the 166 REVIEWS volume.A very useful list of the published writings closes it.We now have a first full portrait of Jack Bennett the man, the teacher and tutor, the scholar and writer-and his picture on the frontispiece aptly completes it. The fifteen contributions to Medieval Studies do not have a common theme-this makes the volume difficult to review, and I shall often limit myself to summing up the core of an argument-but they fall broadly into three major categories: textual and philological, critical, and historical and bibliographical.Needless to say, these continually overlap as befits Jack Bennett's idea of scholarship. N.F.Blake's "On Editing the Canterbury Tales," Derek Brewer's "Ob­ servations on the Text of Trozlus," and P.L.Heyworth's "The Punctuation of Middle English Texts" clearly belong to the first group, though an attentive reading of them would be very healthy for many "pure" literary critics. To study the textual variants of a poem, as Derek Brewer does empirically for Trozlus, is not, of course, a sterile exercise. Gianfranco Contini has made a science of it. Here some of Brewer's conclusions, however tentative, are of great relevance to the study of the poem; one instance "calls into question much of that theory of revision of Root's which is nowadays accepted as fact" (p. 128). Peter Heyworth's examination of punctuation in Usk's Testament and Chaucer's Book ofthe Duchess and Trozlus, with a final example from The Merchant's Tale, makes the con­ vincing point that "if editors of Middle English texts" could "be persuaded to take 'the problem of punctuation' more seriously" we could look "for a much sharpened awareness of an author's language...and a correspond­ ing diminution of confident and misguided editorial assumptions that if a reading is right the sense will take care of itself" (pp. 156-57).Norman Blake's very well argued case in favor of the Hengwrt manuscript (following a line that he has been pursuing for some time) as the one that...