The Endless Knot: Essays on Old and Middle English in Honor of Marie Borroff ed. by M. Teresa Tavormina and R. F. Yeager

Abstract

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER M. TERESA TAVORMINA and R. F. YEAGER, eds. The Endless Knot: Essays on Old and Middle English in Honor ofMarie Borroff Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1995. Pp. ix, 252. $81.00. This anthology of fifteen elegant essays by Marie Borroff's students and friends is an appropriate tribute upon the retirement of one of the fine medievalists of our time.Several of the essays acknowledge their ori­ gin in Professor Borroff's own scholarship or in remarks in her lectures or papers prepared for her seminars. The names of the participants be­ speak the distinction of Professor Borroff's affinity. Would that we could all call upon the influence of a Yale to enhance our efforts with our students. The essays that impress me most are Sherry Reames, "Artistry, Decorum, and Purpose in Three Middle English Retellings of the Cecelia Legend," and R. F. Yeager, "Ben Jonson's English Grammar and John Gower's Reception in theSeventeenth Century." Reames's essay, which grows out of her continuing study of theSt. Cecelia legend cited in her footnotes, is the most impressive scholarly contribution in the volume in its familiarity with manuscripts, texts, and previous criti­ cism. Her discussion of the significance for date and method of compo­ sition and possible political implications of the discovery of two sources for Chaucer's Second Nun's Tale is genuinely important. Yeager's essay is interesting to me for the light it throws on the con­ tinuing standardization of English in the seventeenth century. I do not think that grammars and dictionaries had much effect on the process of standardization until the advent of general education for upward mo­ bility in the eighteenth century, but Jonson's Grammar shows a pre­ science for cultivating English as a medium independent of Latin, and his more than 150 illustrative quotations from Gower, Chaucer, Lydgate, Cheke, Fox, Jewell, Norton, More, Lambert, Ascham, Lord Berners, and the King James Bible (p. 229) established the precedence of the bureaucratic/literary establishment that has controlled the stan­ dardization of the language since the fifteenth century. EricStanley's introductory essay on the survival of dual pronouns in Old English is very interesting, although I wish that he had used the term "direct address" instead of "direct speech" for the locutions in which the dual forms survive. Melissa Furrow's comparison of the def­ erential uses of Latin tags by Gower and Langland with the derisive uses 322 REVIEWS by Chaucer illustrates another reason for Chaucer's superior popularity. Teresa Tavormina has found fascinating associations between the names of John and Aleyn in Chaucer's Miller's Tale and John Aleyn, a clerk in Edward Ill's Chapel Royal. Solar Hall in Cambridge was King's Hall, a branch of the Chapel Royal to which choristers of the Chapel might be sent for further education. John Aleyn was a clerk of the Chapel Royal, a musician of some consequence, and, like Chaucer, employed in vari­ ous errands for the King and Queen. In a motet possibly byJohn Aleyn there is a "Flos Oxonie miracur Nicholaus, qui vocatur Vade Famelico." This Nicholaus became Prior of St. Frideswide's Priory in Oxford, and Tavormina recounts several interesting events that occurred during his administration. She wishes that there were more certainty and signifi­ cance about the names and associations, but the essay reveals again the extent to which Chaucer's poems were addressed to a familiar audience now lost to us. Mary Carruthers has an interesting essay on the purpose of sense im­ agery in Prudentius and the Pearl. She has informative things to say about education in the era of memory. Elizabeth Kirk has a sensitive reading of healing mourning in Pearl. Warren Ginsberg discusses the arrangement of details in Chaucer's Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale as conventionally "relational" rather than postmodernly "associational." John Burrow cites Chaucer's allusions to his "elvishness" as evidence of his reticence and abstraction. Traugott Lawler gives a very close read­ ing of Conscience's dinner in Piers Plowman B.13. Fred Robinson prints eight letters by the Anglo-Saxonist Elizabeth Elstob that point up the plight ofan educated woman...