The Floure and the Leafe, The Assembly of Ladies, The Isle of Ladies ed. by Derek Pearsall, and: Three Middle English Charlemagne Romances ed. by Alan Lupack, and: Six Ecclesiastical Satires ed. by James Dean, and: Heroic Women from the Old Testament in Middle English Verse ed. by Russell A. Peck

Abstract

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER DEREK PEARSALL, ed. The Floure and the Leafe, The Assembly a/Ladies, The Isle ofLadies. Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1990. Pp. 146. $6.95. ALANLUPACK, ed. Three Middle English Charlemagne Romances. Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publica­ tions, 1990. Pp. 207. $6.95. JAMES DEAN, ed. Six Ecclesiastical Satires. Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991. Pp. 250. $8.95. RUSSELL A. PECK, ed. Heroic Womenfrom the Old Testament in Middle English flerse. Middle English Texts Series. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medi­ eval Institute Publications, 1991. Pp. x, 157. $8.95. These are the first four volumes ofthe ambitious and timely Middle English Texts Series published by TEAMS (the Consortium for the Teaching ofthe Middle Ages), designed to make available for classroom use, in paperback and at a very low cost, works other than those by Chaucer, Gower, Lang­ land, the Gawain poet, and Malory. Such texts are usually too expensive for students or are outofprint, and severalnewly edited here are in fact the first scholarly editions published in this century. The general editor of the series, Russell Peck, of the University of Rochester, has long felt the lack ofgood student editions of works that can be taught in conjunction with the major authors or that are otherwise important in the period. The availability ofthese and future volumes in the series should stimulate teachers to create courses that bring familiar and unfamiliar texts into new configurations. Their design and reasonable prices permit assigning only one or two works from a volume, mixing and matching from several volumes to create new groups of primary texts for different course units. Within each volume every text is self-contained: it has its own introduc­ tion, bibliography, marginal glosses (or full translations of knotty lines at the bottom ofthe page), and explanatory notes following. Words common to all the texts in a volume appear in a short glossary in the back. The volumes are handsomely printed in modern orthography in a 7-by-10-inch format that leaves a good amount of white space for student note-taking. The level of glossing, both on the page and in the back, assumes that the reader already has some knowledge of Middle English gained by prior or concurrent undergraduate study of Chaucer. The first two poems in Derek Pearsall's volume (respectively 595 and 756 258 REVIEWS lines, both in rhyme royal) are reprinted with corrections from his 1962 edition, now out of print. Their explanatory notes are sharply reduced or rewritten versions ofthat edition'snotes. Both are allegoricaldreamvisions that have femalenarrators,and, while the sex of their authors is unknown, they are clearly not by the same person, as Skeat thought (Chaucerian and Other Pieces [1897]). The first writer has "radiant and eccentric gifts" (p. 29) and often echoes Chaucer, while the second is capable only of "skillful hack-work" and is chiefly interested in the mechanics of running a noble household. The Isle of Ladies runs 2,235 lines, mainly in octosyllabic couplets, and thus takes up two-thirds of the volume. Its copy text is AnthonyJenkins's Garland edition (1980). Pearsall charitably characterizes this third dream vision as vapid and diffuse, with "almost no power of visualization." He sees its sentences operating to "pump out clouds of verbiagethat, itis hoped, will precipitatehereand thereas sense" (p. 67). It was included not for its literary worth but as "an excellent complement" to the first two poems "in discussions of the fate of late medieval allegory" and its representation of relations between men and women. Its narrator's "dream of male desire" is "perfectly transparent as an allegory of sexual repression and fulfillment" (p. 65). Pearsall also finds it interesting that the "I" of the dreamer is presented on the one hand with "a stumbling earnestness" and "a desire that the audience should re-live with him his experiences," and on the other with "a carelessly sophisticated mock­ nai:vete" and self-conscious play with conventions that "makesuswonder,as we wonder with Chaucer, whether we have been taken in" (p. 66). Al­ though such a formulation may seem to an unsympathetic...