New Medieval Literatures 18 ed. by Laura Ashe et al.

Abstract

Reviewed by: New Medieval Literatures 18 ed. by Laura Ashe et al. Cheryl Taylor Ashe, Laura, Philip Knox, David Lawton, and Wendy Scase, eds, New Medieval Literatures 18, Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2018; hardback; pp. 242; 3 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781843844914. Each of the seven essays in this collection unfolds as a substantial work of scholarship that illuminates aspects of early or high medieval culture. Each contribution either questions received ideas about particular writings, or applies a new approach, or deepens understanding of a literary canon. The following outlines do not do justice to the breadth of evidence and subtlety of analysis on which each author bases her findings. Megan Cavell unfolds wide-ranging scholarship in a study of arachnophobia in early English literature—a topic that proves unexpectedly fruitful. She reveals that Old and Middle English authors, such as the translators of Boethius and the Physiologus, and the poet of the Owl and the Nightingale, rejected Latin authors' admiration for spiders as skilful weavers. Instead, they followed the Bible and its commentators in depicting them as dangerous, deceitful, dirty, and at times monstrous. This essay's uncovering of spiders' normalized gendering as feminine opens the prospect of historical research into their role in European misogyny. The same genus resurfaces as a topic in Hannah Bower's study, 'The Poetics of Late Medieval Medical Texts' (pp. 192–95). This broadly based study tests the applicability of 'literary' to late medieval vernacular recipes, remedies, and uroscopy texts by examining the figures—mainly similes—that they contain. An unconventional comparison between Gilbert of England's and Julian of Norwich's similes of rain falling from the eaves, the former applied to the passing of urine and the latter to Christ's blood, proves to be meticulous and fair-minded. Four essays share an interest in hermits, anchoresses, monks, saints, or devils. Hilary Powell argues that saints' lives were read, not for their (often unlikely) literal truth, but in order to experience 'a transcendent truth about divine grace' (p. 49). Osbern of Canterbury seems to have invented the tale of St Dunstan's grabbing the devil's nose with a pair of tongs. Embellished by Eadmer and paralleled before and after in other saints' lives, the story became a favourite in manuscript art. Powell proposes that such tales supplied meditators with mental images that fended off diabolic assaults in the form of intrusive thoughts. Next, Heather Blurton reconsiders the songs of a second hermit monk, St Godric of Finchale, as the work of a composer who was literate in Latin, but who chose (or was divinely inspired) to write in English. On this basis, she suggests that eleventh- and twelfth-century liturgy permitted the incorporation of some vernacular songs. Thirdly, Jenny C. Bledsoe analyses the role of devils in two saints' lives of the Katherine Group. In a technique that may have inspired C. S. Lewis's wartime [End Page 179] devil Screwtape, Seinte Iuliene suspends readers between sympathy and horror before returning them to an orthodox disgust for Belial in a comic denouement. Likewise, Saint Margaret's demon inadvertently instructs readers in temptation, confession, the Four Last Things, and contemplation of Christ's passion. In a fourth essay concerning demons, Isabella Wheater draws on correspondences newly discovered between Langland's B-Text and Hugh of Fouilloy's Aviarium. She offers fresh interpretations of hawks and other raptors in depictions of Haukyn, Mede, Envy, Covetise, Sleuthe, and Piers/Perkyn. Piers Plowman is the most arcane and profuse of canonical Middle English poems, with the result that multiplying etymologies and speculative source studies in this article tend to overwhelm. The reader will therefore find it helpful to begin at the moving and lucid 'Conclusion' (pp. 178–82). Finally, Cathy Hume offers new insights into the verse Life of Job, possibly written in London between 1430 and 1470, and surviving uniquely in San Marino, CA, MS Huntington 140. This contribution builds on recent reappraisals of fifteenth-century literary culture as one in which, despite Arundel's 1408–09 Constitutions against dissemination of the Wycliffite Bible, biblical literature continued to flourish. Job's close relationship with the Bible, which its...