Shifting Focus to Mozart's Operas

Abstract

Grassnick, Ulrike. Ratgeber des Konigs: Furstenspiegel und Herrscherideal im spatmittelalterlichen England. Koln: Bohlau Verlag, 2004. Pp. xii; 471. Ulrike Grassnick's book bears the subtitle Furstenspiegel und Herrscherideal im spatmittelalterlichen England, which accurately describes the contents of the volume. author studies seven Mirrors of Princes in Middle English: John Trevisa's Governance of Kings and Princes (c. 1388-92), Thomas Hoccleve's TheEegiment of Princes (c. 1410-11), John Lydgate and Benedict Burgh's Secrees qfoldPhilisqffres (1449-50), Sir Gilbert Hay's Buke of the Gouernaunce of Princis (c.1456), George Ashby's Active Policy of a Prince (1470), John Gower's Confessio Amantis (Book VlI - 1386-93), and Geoffrey Chaucer's Tale ofMelibee (c. 13 72-74). All of these texts were produced between the 1370s and the 1470s (none are extant from the 1200s), and in their form the first five are pragmatic texts, while the last two are narrative-fictional. Interestingly, according to Grassnick, Chaucer's Tak ofMelibee, one of the narrative-fictional texts, is the earliest Furstenspiegel in English. Thus, Chaucer not only wrote the earliest manual on the use of a scientific instrument in English, The Treatise on the Astrolabe, but also the first Mirror of Princes in the vernacular. As G. points out, Tale qfMelibee is one of only two prose elements in the Canterbury Tales (along with Parson's Tale), and it is the one that the poet assigns to his own fictional alter ego, Chaucer-thePUgrim. G. gives special attention to narrative-fictional texts, so that her book is informative and thought provoking not only for students of political science but of literature and history as well. In her fifty-page introduction, G. defines the primary goal of the Furstenspiegel to be the creation of behavioral patterns proper to leadership (32), a function quite different from the mirroring of existing behavior that the word Furstenspiegel seems to imply. Quoting Pierre Bourdieu in English, she writes: Symbolic power is a power to construct reality (29) ; in fact, G. identifies her methodological position as borrowed from Bourdieu's Handlungstheorie (Praktische Vernunft. Zur Theorie des Handelns [Frankfurt a. M.: 1998]) and acknowledges her use of his central concepts of Feld, Kapital, Sozialer Raum, and Habitus [pattern of behavior - 18]. In her Literaturverzeichnis [Works Cited], sixteen entries are by Bourdieu. Within the political and literary fields of the Middle Ages, therefore, G. recognizes that the image of an ideal leader may be as much a construction of the texts as a critique of any prevailing system or specific leader. Her second chapter provides a brief history of the medieval Furstenspiegel During the Middle Ages theorists generally drew their models of kingship from Old and New Testament traditions rather than from those of classical antiquity, although the Secretum Secretorum [Secret of Secrets], the Letter to Alexander the Great by the Pseudo- Aristotle, was very influential and often translated. It was St. Augustine who interpreted the Bible as the first mirror, and that interpretation prevailed as other texts became secondary mirrors of archetypal and exemplary models of behavior. Throughout the Middle Ages, the Furstenspiegel followed this Augustinian textual tradition in the construction of ideal leader images. Grassnick's third chapter contains a separate section on each of the seven Furstenspiegel that her book treats. order of her discussion is not strictly chronological: the narrative-fictional texts (Gower's and Chaucer's) are grouped last because they offer the expanded possibilities of meaning that fiction permits. …