Poetry and prophecy: the beginnings of a literary tradition , and: Piers Plowman and prophecy: an approach to the C-text (review)

Abstract

Reviews 195 abbreviations Bede's Historia ecclesiastica appears as Historia ecclesia. The analysis of Domesday values is duplicated at pp. 110-11 and in Appendix B (pp. 152-3), and the three values for Norton (p. 153) are wrong: they were£6, £3 and £6-10-0, not £6, £4 and £5. This work clearly needed a great deal more editorial direction, control and proofreading. A piece of work should hardly have this number of errors. Useful though it may be in suggesting a model for approaches to the study of local andregionalhistory, on other matters lector caveat. John Walmsley School of History, Philosophy and Politics Macquarie Univeristy Kugel, James L., ed., Poetry and prophecy: the beginnings of a literary tradition (Myth and poetics), Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1990; cloth and paper; pp. xii, 251; R.R.P. US$34.95 (cloth), $12.95 (paper) plus 1 0 % overseas. Steinberg, Theodore L., Piers Plowman and prophecy: an approach to the C-text (Garland studies in medieval literature), N.Y. and London, Garland, 1991; cloth; pp. xx, 154; R.R.P. US$20.00. Therelationshipbetween poetry and prophecy is a topic whose time has come. A n increasing number of scholars suspects that inquiry into the relationship may reveal 'the beginnings of a literary tradition', to use the subtide of Kugel's essay collection. If so, its results may entail a revision of Middle English literary history, in which Chaucer has been cast in the role of inaugurator. For it is his maverick contemporary, Langland, who represents any such literary tradition in English. Kugel's volume is a collection of essays arising from an important conference on 'Poetry and prophecy' held at Harvard in 1986. A major contributor at the conference was the great Middle English scholar, Morton W. Bloomfield, w h o gave a paper entitied 'Poetry in prophecy and apocalypse', apparendy drawing both on his wide reading in comparative literature and on his lifelong expertise in Piers Plowman. Bloomfield died before he was able to revise his paper for publication, and his essay is therefore a major absence from the collection. In it, Bloomfield tried to rephrase recurrent questions about Piers Plowman and its association of the political and the spiritual, and used the notion of prophecy to redraw the boundaries between technique (poetry) and content. 196 Reviews Theodore Steinberg's Piers Plowman and prophecy appeared in 1991, the year after the conference proceedings. It is influenced by Bloomfield's work, as all Piers Plowman scholarship is, but otherwise shows no awareness of the Harvard enterprise. Steinberg's work is therefore a sign of the timeliness of his ideas, and acts as a useful introduction for those who might wish to ask questions about therelationof poetry and prophecy in Langland's poem alone. It proposes that prophecy is a formative genre of Piers Plowman, an idea put forward by Stephen Barney in 1988, though it is equivocal about what this may mean. At times Steinberg writes as if prophecy is the key, and gives the lie to all those who deny that the poem has a single genre. This is the viewpoint that enables him to give a rather patronising account of Donaldson's pioneer work on minstrels in the poem, and then note that Donaldson overlooked 'the correct conclusion' (p. 54). At other times he locates prophecy as one genre among many, and denies that his work sets out to override other views of Langland's poem. A third version of Steinberg's argument is prophecy as portmanteau, the use of which explains all sorts of features once thought to be anomalous such as the poem's 'careless' structure, its 'disjunctive style' (p. 90) or its 'discontinuity and cavalier treatment of space and time' (p. 88). Steinberg is not afraid of adducing as support the fact that 'there are also a great many passages in the poem that simply sound prophetic' (p. 91). In some respects the oscillations of Steinberg's argument mimic tbe poem itself, but they do suggest a certain vagueness about the main thesis. Tbe problem is that Steinberg does not follow through from his initial, and unexceptionable, statement: 'Piers Plowman ... is a...