Readings in Medieval Textuality: Essays in Honour of A. C. Spearing ed. by Cristina Maria Cervone, and D. Vance Smith

Abstract

Reviewed by: Readings in Medieval Textuality: Essays in Honour of A. C. Spearing ed. by Cristina Maria Cervone, and D. Vance Smith Cheryl Taylor Cervone, Cristina Maria, and D. Vance Smith, eds, Readings in Medieval Textuality: Essays in Honour of A. C. Spearing, Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 2016; cloth; pp. xxxvi, 248; 5 b/w illustrations, 1 b/w plate; R.R.P. £60.00; ISBN 9781843844464. Compiled by leading scholars in American and English universities, this Festschrift contains an overview of approaches taken to medieval poetry since A. C. Spearing published his first book, Criticism and Medieval Poetry, in 1964. The editors have created a unity rare in such collections by returning to contributors' personal acquaintance with Spearing and/or responses to his ideas as points of reference. Moreover, except for J. A. Burrow's stimulating consignment of the Confessio [End Page 153] Amantis and the Canterbury Tales to the genre of dits, and Ardis Butterfield's elegant manuscript study of 'Maiden in the Mor Lay', each essay builds its argument around selected, usually short, passages from Chaucer, Langland, Gower, the Gawain-poet, or the lyrists. The contents therefore justify the title's respect for 'textuality', which has always been central to Spearing's approach(p. xviii). While the reader may sometimes feel herself to be 'roaming' like Emily in an academic hortus conclusus, the parameters imposed by the editors and the seasoned talents of the writers have produced a collection of the highest quality. Backed by Peter Baker's list of Spearing's publications, Cristina Maria Cervone's and D. Vance Smith's introduction reviews his creative applications over decades of his own and others' thinking on formalism, close reading, subjectivity, narratology, autography, and the pleasure of the text, and traces influences on his work that were at different times contrary (F. R. Leavis, C. S. Lewis, D. W. Robertson) and nurturing (Elizabeth Salter, Helen Cooper). Pointing to his 'drawing on theories from other disciplines or other areas of literary studies, notably film theory' (p. xviii), the editors find in Spearing's publications an adaptability and breadth of learning that might well serve apprentice critics as a model. Baker's and Elizabeth Fowler's 'appreciations' in Chapter 13, and Cervone's transcription from the 1950s of mysterious verses 'apparently by the Gawain-poet' (pp. 219–22), testify to the flourishing of wit and good will in an enclave of humane studies which—as readers who share its values believe—inherently opposes the barbarism of our time. Since the editors further assist readers by summarizing each essay (pp. xxiv–xxvii), I will deal in what follows with what I regard as highlights and a few dark spots in the collection. David Aers's reminiscence of Spearing's tactful guidance pinpoints the striking reversal that has taken place in medieval literary studies since the 1980s, when 'ideological glossing and language' were encouraged to 'dominate and colonize' medieval texts (p. 87). In an essay that rewrites what he now regards as his former unsympathetic application of the 'discourses of psychoanalysis', Aers analyses Troilus's conversion to love, metaphysical questing, despair, and accompanying winning and losing of moral virtue in the light of Augustinian theology and metaphysics (pp. 88–95). Chaucer, he thinks, recognized the impasse, unresolved even in Boethius, to which anguished consideration of the contradiction between human free will and God's foreknowledge brings Troilus, whose ultimate fate as a pagan remains ambiguous. However, 'the beautiful closing prayer to the Trinity', which Aers quotes, expresses the hope sustained by Chaucer and his fellow Christians that grace and a love 'proportionate to human nature' might lead them at last to the 'pleyn felicite' of heaven (p. 95). Like Aers's essay, those by Derek Pearsall, Fowler, Claire M. Waters, Michael Calabrese, Butterfield, and Cervone demonstrate how much intellectual distance sensitive close readings, even of textual minutiae, can traverse. The essays in this collection contrast, and in my view vary in quality, according to their use and placement of such readings. By drawing on her researching or teaching of the [End Page 154] Latin beast epic Ysengrimus, Coleridge's 'Frost at Midnight', Chaucer's ballade 'To Rosemounde', and two passages about Arcite...