STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER SARAH SPENCE. Rhetorics a/Reason andDesire: Vergil, Augustine, andthe Troubadours. Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1988. Pp. xvii, 159. $22.50. Near the beginning of her brief, evocative new book, Sarah Spence quotes Isocrates on the human gift of language and the social opportunities granted by its study. "There has been implanted in us," he wrote, "the power to persuade each other and make clear to each other whatever we desire" (p. 12). This synthesis of power and clarity-that is, of the per suasive and organizational abilities of the trained rhetorician -forms one of the earliest statements of the purpose of Greek oratory and, in turn, articulates the governing approach of Spence's book. Through studies of Vergil, Augustine, and the Troubadours, Spence seeks to define the nature of that synthesis. She finds in the Aeneid, the Confessions, and the alba figures of the hero as a rhetor. Such verbal performers are also lovers and readers who become not simply pleaders for a cause but "spokesmen for their cultures." The study of these dramatizations of rhetoric in action, therefore, opens up for critical inspection the underlying assumptions of Classical and Medieval literary culture: assumptions about the role of language in social organization, about the relationships between male speakers and female readers, and about the fictional construction of the narrative persona and its fruitfully tense apposition to the author's voice. Though organized chronologically, Rhetorics a/Reason andDesire is not a study of direct influences. While the book does make claims for the "Ciceronian" contexts of Vergilian and Augustinian rhetoric, and while it does assert that the works of the Troubadours are, in a fundamental sense, "Augustinian," it is not centrally concerned with tracing lines of doctrine, technique, or allusion. Rather, this book is primarily about a set of thema tic preoccupations that inform the texture of Latin and vernacular self presentation. Its argument about the "Augustinian inheritance" of the Troubadours, for example, is less about the influence of Augustine on, say, Guillaume IX than about how certain problems generated by close read ings of the Confessions can be found in the close reading of the later lyrics. At times it seems that Spence's point is that recent approaches to Au gustine's work can be used to read the Troubadours. The fascination with the problematics of the sign and the so-called "rhetoric of silence" that modern critics have discerned in Augustine may provide a framework in which to appreciate the fissures generated by the language of the alba. By contrast, modern readings of what Spence calls "The erasure of sexual 238 REVIEWS difference" in the Troubadour lyric (p. 111) may be projected back to understand the gendered rhetoric of Vergil's Juno or to see how "Vergil's subversive stance" expresses itself in the representation of Dido's en trapment in the "cultural paradigm ofrhetoric and power" (p. 36). For professional scholars ofthe texts discussed in this book, Rhetorics of Reason and Desire may at first appear to say relatively little that is new. Those trained in the traditions ofmedieval Augustinianism, for example, may find her claim to "argue that the De doctrina christiana provides us with a model for the communication ofall textual truths-profane as well as sublime-throughout the Middle Ages" (p. 95) either naive or self evident. Historians of rhetoric may see in the book's chapters only the outlines ofa larger history needing to be written. And readers fresh from Sylvia Huot's erudite From Song to Book and Laura Kendrick's aggressively revisionary The Game ofLove: Troubadour Wordplay may find the last chapter of Spence's book more intuitive than either scholarly or critical. There are, however, several sections of this study that display Spence's talents as a literary historian. One in particular is her extended reading of Roman catacomb paintings as, in effect, rhetorical performances whose pictorial idioms refract the aesthetic energies ofAugustine's andJerome's notions ofrhetoric in society. Another is her opening account of what has come to be appreciated as the "dark" Vergil (especially in the work ofM. C. Putnam and W. R. Johnson), with its critiques...