The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 4000–1200 by Mary Carruthers

Abstract

REVIEWS Princes. As with Blyth’s edition, Burrow’s method is conditioned by the existence, rare for an editor of medieval verse, of no less than three holographic manuscripts by Hoccleve. In the case of the Regement, which does not itself survive in a holograph, the holographic remains of other texts allow Blyth to follow D. C. Greetham’s proposal for the ‘‘normalisation of accidentals,’’ a procedure whereby even a generally trustworthy scribal manuscript may be amended in matters of spelling, metrics, and morphology in instances where these usages conflict with Hoccleve’s known, and remarkably consistent, practices in the surviving holographs . In the case of the Series, Burrow uses the guidance of Hoccleve’s known practice elsewhere to establish criteria by which to correct Selden on grounds of spelling, morphology, and metrical variation. Moreover, he provides a fill collation of all other existing manuscripts to verify Selden in substantial matters. The result of this labor is the most reliable text to date of both the ‘‘Complaint’’ and ‘‘Dialogue with a Friend.’’ In addition, the apparatus of the volume lives up to the customary lucidity and good judgment of Burrow’s work. The historical material in his introduction is concise and entirely reliable, and his notes add a number of significant new readings to these passages. They will no doubt be offering hints to students of Hoccleve for some time. He also offers three excurses as appendixes: exploring variation between the two holographs of ‘‘Learn to Die’’; printing an important parallel passage from Isidore of Seville; and giving substantial new historical contextualization to Hoccleve’s reference to ‘‘coin-clipping.’’ All in all, this edition represents a significant new moment in Hoccleve scholarship. If there is a fault, it lies only in the fact that some readers may wish for more of a good thing, that Burrow had given us a new text in a single volume through to the end of the Series, but as the edition now stands he is owed gratitude for finally providing reliable texts of these important works. Ethan Knapp The Ohio State University Mary Carruthers, The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 4000–1200. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xvii, 399. $59.95. One of the odder, and rather amiable, characteristics of the postmodern condition in the humanist disciplines is how persistently romantic its 531 ................. 8972$$ CH21 11-01-10 12:23:06 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER academic practitioners remain when trying to think about the mental processes governing linguistic interiority, and creative thought. Even those among us willing to wave a cool goodbye to the autonomous author and illusions of stable meaning still resort to the imagination, creativity , originality, expressive personality, and notions bordering on inspiration to gesture at the sources of literary productivity and complex ideation. We like to think that our best ideas ‘‘come’’ to us out of a serendipitous meeting of acquired knowledge with innate brilliance, making even laboriously footnoted scholarship something personal and poetic, and we generously project this intuited process backward onto writers and thinkers of the distant past, or at least the ones we like. In The Craft of Thought: Meditation, Rhetoric, and the Making of Images, 400–1200, the companion volume to her study of medieval memory practices (The Book of Memory, 1990), Mary Carruthers teaches us how highly literate medieval persons, formed by a consistent and coherent rhetorical education, thought about the experience of thinking, and consciously considered the process of making new things with the contents of their minds. Everything in this erudite and lucid study works to dislodge our recalcitrant notions of memorization as passive rote storage, and of rhetoric as formulaic set-piece repetition, and replace them with active energetic concepts: of memory as ‘‘a universal thinking machine’’ for making new and complex thoughts; of cogitation as ‘‘craft’’ and rhetoric as task-oriented user instructions for retrieving mental contents for new uses. In a central sense, Carruthers’s difficult task is to explain, in several overlapping, mutually illuminating ways, the difference between ‘‘having’’ ideas and ‘‘making’’ them—between persistently romantic inspirational notions and hard-to-recapture premodern modes of thinking about thinking. In a historically...