New Medieval Literatures. Volume I by Wendy Scase , Rita Copeland , David Lawton (review)

Abstract

New Medieval Literatures.Volumei. Ed. by WENDY SCASE, RITA COPELAND, and DAVID LAWTON. Oxford: Clarendon Press. I997. vii + 278 pp. ?37.50. One importanteffect of the appearance of this new seriesis to provide an Englishbasedforumfortheoreticallyawareinterrogationsof medieval texts(English-based, thatis, in whateversensewe arepreparedto concede to publicationwith Clarendon Press).PerhapsI should furtherqualify my observationby saying that what really characterizes the volume is its aggressively theoretical stance: English-based periodicals carry theoretically powered engagements with medieval texts, to be sure,but none to date so sustainedlyasNewMedieval Literatures. It is thereforereassuringthat this debut is one distinguishedby quality and selfconfidence . It contains eight contributions, including an introduction, 'New Medieval Literatures: Breaking the Seal', by Wendy Scase, and a concluding analytical survey, 'LiteraryHistory and Cultural Study', by David Lawton. 'The subject of the volume is the essays themselves', Scase declares (p. I), and the editorial manifesto prefacing the title page lends further definition: what really matters is the 'new' and the 'challenging'. However, projected volumes are not to be quite as unzipped and uncorsetted as this might suggest. A fixed point of reference will be the regular analytical survey, here provided by Lawton in an engaging and avowedly personal canter through the fields of cultural studies and interdisciplinarity.The titleof Scase'sintroductionseemsto have takenits cue from James Simpson's contribution, an absorbing view into the ways in which the sixteenth century attempted to 'seal off' the medieval past in order better to construct and define its Renaissance present. Most of the other contributions concernthefourteenthandfifteenthcenturies,andthus,irrespectiveof theprofessed centring upon the essays themselves, the volume acquires a periodizing centre of gravity.An interestingexception is the essayby MargaretCluniesRoss on Icelandic literaryproduction, in which she studiesthe way that sagaliteratureunderwrotethe territorialand social claims made by settlersin Iceland. Another vacation from the volume's generally Anglocentric, if not temporal, focus, is afforded by Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Steven Justice. Their carefully researched piece conveys a valuable impressionof the sortsof people who were the firstreadersand circulators of PiersPlowman. Chancery in London, its personnel and offices, are convincingly presented as PiersPlowman's culturalepicentre, and a good case is made for seeing the now famous MS Douce 104, an extensively illustratedcopy of the C-text, as a product of a sister institution, the Dublin Exchequer. Thus the readershipof Piers Plowman 'was not so utterly removed from the Continental urbanity of Chaucer's metropolitanreadershipas it has sometimesbeen thought'. Paul Strohm writes about a counterfeiter, William Carsewell, who, in I419, concocted an incriminatingtale against the prior of Wenlock Abbey and SirJohn Oldcastle that he imagined would be music to the ears of the authorities.It is less what Carsewell said in the hope of saving his skin (his testimony was evidently unreliable)than how he framedwhat he saidaccordingto historicallyrealdiscourses that interests Strohm. Strohm finds multifold conceptual links between counterfeiting,orthodox views on Lollarddoctrine, the Lancastrianappropriation of the ceremonies of royal legitimacy, and the political dynamic that drove the Lancastrianpoet Thomas Hoccleve. The piece is articulatedwith the claritywith which Strohm's work has become synonymous. Lollards surface again in Rita Copeland's warning that diachronic perspective is likely to be one of the first casualties of our largely synchronic analysis of late-medieval English religious dissent. She traces ways in which aspects of Lollard and anti-Lollard polemic connect with ancient pedagogical traditions,showing how in Lollardpractice, the Reviews I52 MLR, 96.I, 200I MLR, 96.I, 200I pedagogy of the literal sense overstepped orthodox bounds to grasphermeneutical and political agency. One of the longer contributionsin the volume is a richlythoughtfuldiscussionby Nicholas Watson of the way the English vernacular, far from denigrating the religious matter for which it increasinglyserved as a vehicle, was on the contrary ennobled by it, and became, as it were, a stylisticsite for a vernaculartheology of kenosis. Indeed, only in thevernacularcould 'homely'theologyfinditsvoice. Shorter than Watson's,but equally well pondered, is Ruth Evans'sdeliberationon how the modes of addressof stagedbodies areable to constructidentitiesfortheiraudiences. In particular, she is interested in the possible positions assumed by medieval Yorkaudiences in relation to the performance of Mary's body. (The evidence for earlyaudience responseto plays, though it is indeed sparse,is, however, fractionally more than she allows, but this does not spoil her general argument...