REVIEWS ROBERT R. EDWARDS. Ratio and Invention: A Study ofMedieval Lyric and Narrative. Nashville, Tenn.: Vanderbilt University Press, 198 9. Pp. xxii, 193.$22.95. Robert Edwards's ambitious book attempts to overcome one of the most stubborn problems ofmedieval literary studies : the perceived gap between the era's theorizing about literature and its literary practice.As he puts it, "Despite their apparent anomalies, the medieval systems [oftheorizing about and classifying literature]offer a rich source for understanding the poetry of the age. The task ofmodern readers is to discover where that richness lies and devise the strategies that will allow us to recover some of what the age had to say about poetry" (p. 146). The heart ofEdwards's argument is that medieval literary theories "are in some important way in dialogue with the worksthey explain." This means that "we can approach medieval literary theory using the methods of analysis that we apply to the poetry" (p. 147) and, reciprocally, look at medieval texts with an eye to discovering how they adapt established systems of literary theory to the needs and concerns of literary practice. Neither ofthese perceptions is particularly new, as Edwards would surely admit; a propos the latter, one thinks of R. Howard Bloch's emphatic assertion ("New Philology and Old French," Speculum 65 [19 90]: 47) that "the most basic premise ofthe medieval creative act is not an absence of theory...but the thorough integration for medieval writers of theory and practice.... The theory ofmedieval texts is in the praxis, and there is no praxis without consciousness (and therefore intention) on the poet's part of the metatheoretical nature ofmedieval poetic practice." But in juxtaposing within one critical exercise "a literary reading of criticism and a critical reading ofliterature" (p. 148),Edwards proposes a new set ofunderstand ings ofboth dominant critical theories and individual lyric and narrative texts. Ratio and Invention divides its argument into two sections, according to genre. The sections begin with "interchapters" that contextualize the "dominant [theoretical]commonplaces ofthe genres...[viz.,]the musical aesthetic that Augustine applied to lyric poetry and the rhetorical pro cedure of invention that was used to define the controlling idea of a narrative poem" (p. xviii). The subsequent chapters ofeach section deal with particular topics and/or texts relevant to the genre. Chapters 1 to 3 explicate two lyric topoi, the ideal landscape and the dream vision, as responses to two issues raised in book 6 ofSt.Augustine's 121 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER De musica. The tension Augustine posits between the body's and the soul's respective responses-carnal and spiritual- to "the order contained in the numbers ofpoetry" finds a reflection in the "several ways in which the lyric speaker situates himself in relation to ideal nature" (p. 16). "The lyric 'I,' like the soul in relation to the body, can remove itselffrom the celebration of the senses" and gravitate toward intellectual apprehension or "self referential absorption" (pp. 32-33). The dream vision, on the other hand, mediates Augustine's concern that, in the soul's experience of poetry, memory produces phantasies (images based on recollection ofsensory experience) and phantasms (mere "images of images,'' lacking experiential basis) and can thus lead the soul away from its goal, the true knowledge of God, into the realms ofopinion and error. Edwards explores how Augustine's "discrimination between reproductive and constitutive images gives rise to a poetry that explores the artistic and psychological intricacies ofsubjectivity" (p. 147); the operative distinction here is between lyrics in which visionary dreams stand as metaphors for the transformation of memory into higher truth, "aesthetic apprehension" (p. 39), or "the shaping of sense experience into aesthetic form" (p. 40), and other lyrics recounting visions based not in memory but in erotic desire. In this last category Augustine's condemned phantasms become occasions celebrating poetic creation, "the insubstantial image created out of the imaginationand referring to literary tradition rather than lived expreience" (p. 67). The theoretical basis for the chapters on narrative is provided by the Parisianapoetria (ca. 1220-35) ofJohn of Garland. Edwards singles out as ofspecial importance two aspects ofJohn's theorizing: it blurs the bound aries between factual and...
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Sep 15, 2020
Lorena Núñez Pinero 
Open Access