The Medieval Literary: Beyond Form by Robert J. Meyer-Lee Catherine Sanok

Abstract

MLR, .,   Nonsense theorists must oen grapple with problems of tone and form: how can a scholarly study track the digressive, playful, or contradictory nature of nonsense while shaping a coherent argument? Massey offers his readers a range of ploys: his second chapter, on metaphor and nonsense, includes his own notes, compiled over forty years and complete with highlighted text, and instructions to ‘skip the most awkward passages’ (p. ). Elsewhere, there are digressions, sustained analogies between clouds and sentences, Kant’s notion of beauty pinned onto the everyday, and some striking insights on the relationship between nonsense and ritual. Yet this levity is absent at other moments. Perhaps the necessary unease that writers must have when their subject is nonsense is notable in the implicit moral judgement which hovers throughout the chapters: Massey counters his own ‘downright offensive’ (p. ) accusation that Keats’s poetry might have something to tell us on the subject. Consideration of the moral or ethical grounds of the category would have been a welcome addition. Massey’s project is wonderfully capacious and discursive, and any study of nonsense worthy of the name must balance its interdisciplinary demands with the topic’s call to play. If the open-ended and provisional chapter structures sometimes make it hard to shape a developing argument, they have much to tell us about Hamlet’s clouds. U  S W M e Medieval Literary: Beyond Form. Ed. by R J. M-L and C S. Cambridge: Brewer. . xii+ pp. £. ISBN ––– – (ebk ––––). e editors of this volume claim that each of its essays—all with female authors, one co-written with a man—responds to ‘the recent return to formalist approaches’ in twenty-first-century scholarship and shows that ‘form, liberated from fixed taxonomies that axiomatically index the literary, can serve instead as a lens for recognizing fluid points of contact and influence across aesthetic, linguistic, textual , and conceptual registers’ (pp. , ). I would say, rather, that the chapters continue a long-standing interest in formal approaches (Jill Mann, Stephen Knight, A. V. C. Schmidt, Alan Gaylord, A. C. Spearing, Lynn Staley, and others) and build on taxonomies that have never been ‘fixed’. And they do so very well indeed. Part  argues for the ‘literary’ character of ‘instrumental’ texts: Marian miracles (Claire Waters), lyrics and grammars (Ingrid Nelson), and books of hours (Jessica Brantley). e readings are brilliant, but it is no hard task to call x text literary. Do any criteria exist for the exclusion of a given text from that category? Part , ‘Form Performed’, starts off with Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and Andrew Klein’s scolding of editors’ placement of the bobs of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight where form demands rather than in the margins, as in the manuscript. Tolkien, so they say, ‘was so puzzled by the placement of the bob [. . .] that he wondered if it was an aerthought’, against which they cite Ad Putter’s observation that ‘the integrity of  Reviews the manuscript’ undermines that claim (p.  and n. ; also p. ). Yet this was Norman Davis’s proposal, not Tolkien’s, responding not to the bobs’ placement but their (formal) redundancy, and Davis himself said that the bobs ‘were not added to the present manuscript later than the poem as a whole’ (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, ed. by J. R. R. Tolkien and E. V. Gordon, nd edn, rev. by Norman Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ), p. ; there is no equivalent in the Tolkien–Gordon first edition of ). Next, Shannon Gayk brilliantly argues that the protagonists of the Towneley Shepherds’ Plays ‘model a vernacular, liturgical, incarnational style that aims to reconcile the transcendent and the immanent’ (p. ), and Sarah Elliott Novacich contends that Sir Orfeo ‘creates out of or is inspired by that which it cannot fully reproduce or represent’ (p. ). Finally, ‘Temporalities of Form’: Anke Bernau shows that Jonah’s ‘refusal and ensuing learning process’ upon being commanded to be a prophet, in the alliterative Patience, show that ‘being a messenger of God is as much a process of formation for the prophet as it is for those to whom he brings God’s message’ (p. , her emphasis). It is a great chapter...