Sanctifying Signs: Making Christian Tradition in Late Medieval England by David Aers

Abstract

MLR, I0 I .4, 2oo6 Io85 allowed romance writers narrrative opportunites for fictions (Wace and Mannyng reserve judgement on their truth); Chretien's romances are inserted here inMS BN fr. I450 ofWace's Brut (p. 222), and Gray, Hardyng, and scribes of Robert of Gloucester locate the details they derive from romances in these years (pp. 47, 173, 2I6). Moll asserts that insular historians sift fact from fiction more carefully than con tinental historians, but nevertheless shows how Hardyng's shorter and unfinished longer Chronicle add romance material, especially from the Grail narratives. Other influences from romance on many writers are Arthur's death and Chretien's hero Yvain, merely mentioned in Geoffrey (Historia, xi. I) and Wace, where he is curteis (in Lawman he is 'fair'). Moll's endnotes are extensive, and include translations of all his Latin and French quotations, which is frustrating since itmeans reading the book at two ends simulta neously; for many readers translations are essential and should appear immediately after the original quotation. There are some typographical or factual errors (Gray appears as 'Gary', for instance, p. 69) and some repetition (remedied by a full index). Moll's isolation of minute details in these extensive texts is impressive and will be something of an eye-opener formany scholars. QUEEN MARY, UNIVERSITY OF LONDON ROSAMUND ALLEN Sanctifying Signs: Making Christian Tradition inLate Medieval England. By DAVID AERS. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. 2004. Xiii +28I PP. ?42.50 (pbk ?I9.50). ISBN 0-268-0202I-3 (pbk o-268-02022-I). David Aers's latest volume of intricately argued polemical essays concerns the con tribution of texts to 'processes of tradition formation, reformation, and preservation' (p. vii) in latemedieval English Christianity. The title Sanctifying Signs is rather a grand way of conferring unity on the book. For four chapters and one hundred pages the reader is given absorbing historicized accounts of textual constructions of the sacrament of the altar. The case studies are of constructions by Nicholas Love in hisMirror, seen as selectively forging an objection able version of 'orthodoxy' obsessed with consecration of the Host and its visibility rather than its human reception; by Langland, whose 'reticence' and 'brevity' on this sacrament are interpreted as a calculated protest at the fussy prolixity of contempo rary debate about how to define Christ's presence in the Eucharistic bread; byWyclif, in his Tractatus maior on the Eucharist; and by the supposedly heterodox Walter Brut andWilliam Thorpe. Of these last two, Brut is found to be more open-minded in his questioning, while Thorpe-reserving the right to define communion and 'the Church' in his own way-is found to be judgemental and auto-authorized. A book that seemed powerfully focused up to this point now surprises the reader by following up with an extended chapter on the 'sign of poverty' in Piers Plowman, and then a sort of coda on households as 'signs' either of Lollard discipleship or of counter-Lollard sanctified domesticity. This brief last chapter rounds off the volume with a return to Love's Mirror, at the cost of stretching the concept of a 'sign' to lengths that will puzzle some readers. Characteristically, Aers's writing is amix of meticulous textual analysis (the slow build-up) and pungent targeting (the coup de grace). Among the modern targets in this case are the historian Eamon Duffy, for alleged failure to historicize religious 'traditions', and the Langland scholar Lawrence Clopper, for claiming that Piers Plowman champions a 'Franciscan' ideal of poverty: Aers's analysis indeed expertly demonstrates how the poem's shifting dialectic unsettles such a reading. It transpires thatWilliam Langland alone passes the test set byAers-a test grounded in a curious io86 Reviews holy alliance between Archbishop Rowan Williams and St Thomas Aquinas-which is whether the given medieval writer could think of the Church, founded amidst betrayal and dependent on flawed ministers, as 'acommunity both immersed in sin and yet also the divine gift inwhich [thewriter] received the sacraments' (p. 96).William Thorpe's critique of apersecuting Church 'could have opened out towards' the insight of Rowan Williams, but 'did not' (p. 97). This, tome, is a quite amazing might...