REVIEWS157 in important new light. That N. R. Havely's paper, 'Muses and Blacksmiths: Italian Trecento Poetics and the Reception of Dante in "The House of Fame,"' is less stimulating has perhaps to do with the nature of the material: Italian was not as vivid in England as Latin or French or English, evidently, and with Havely the issues remain Chaucer's Italian journeys and his personal absorption of Italian influence. Though less systematic, most evocative are the several essays that bring into the calculus non-literary English writings and non-verbal means of making meaning. In 'Women's Piety and Women's Power: Chaucer's Prioress Reconsidered,' Carol Meale uses bibliographical and documentary evidence ofthewomanly conventual cultures ofBarking Abbey and the priory ofSt. Leonards at Stratford at Bow to argue for different evaluations of the 'General Prologue' description of the Prioress and of her tale. In 'Looking for a Sign: The Quest for Nominalism in Chaucer and Langland,' Minnis develops evidence from theological writing—especiallysuch Anglo-Latin writers as Robert Holcot, Thomas Bradwardine, and Ralph Strode, amongst others, 'who produced theological bookswhich enjoyed a popularity beyond the schools,' helping to 'prepare the ground for vernacular theology'—and shows what part the chief Ricardian poets took in such theological discussions, across linguistic and generic boundaries. Richard Firth Green, in 'Ricardian "Trouthe": A Legal Perspective,' does similar work with legal practices and discourses, showing how the Ricardian poets' work was embedded in non-literary traditions again. AndThorlacTurville-Petre, in 'The Pearl-Poet in his "Fayre Regioun,"' discusses literary demographics, in effect: the shifts in population distribution, commercial traffic, and political arrangements making for a 'national' Ricardian literature, of which even the Pearl-poet is an exponent, he argues, where Edwardian literature had been several segregate 'regional' literatures: impersonal social circumstance speaks through. To wish for papers on painting, say, and architecture, or civic pageantry and royal ritual, or banqueting, would perhaps be to wish for too much, though work along such lines is ofcourse beingdone, and by persons undoubtedly influenced by Burrow's Ricardian Poetry. For all the laudable editorial foresight that went into conceiving Essays on Ricardian Literature, these are essays, suggestive rather than comprehensive. Though this is not a handbook of Ricardian literature nor of Ricardian studies, the book is well conceived, in a wayfestschriften often are not, and executed with a high level ofscholarly and critical acumen. This collection ofpapers does a good deal by itselfand should have the effect of stimulating more such work, towards realizing the project John Burrow conceived in Ricardian Poetry, 'a truly synoptic view' of Ricardian culture. DAVID R. CARLSON University of Ottawa derek PEARSALL, ed., Chaucer to Spenser, An Anthology. Maiden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1998. Pp. 686. isbn: 0-631-19838-5. $74.95 (hard) isbn: 0-631-198393 (paper) $36.95. This anthology is organized in response to theoretical debates that will be familiar to many instructors of early modern literature, if not to students: the 'arbitrariness of 158ARTHURIANA periodization,' the new historicist demands for reading literature in cultural and historical contexts, the literary value of inferior' or noncanonical writing. In place of the traditional assemblage ofGreat Works from the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are nondramatic poems plus excerpts from letters, biographies, speeches, prologues, and treatises, to be read in relation to cultural and literary themes and 'against' one another. In his short introduction, Pearsall names his themes (as arbitrary, ofcourse, as the periods he eschews)—the status ofEnglish, the rise of mysticism and affective devotion, a preoccupation with mutability, civic versus personal ethics, the representation of women, and a foregrounding of an interior subjectivity—but he fails to provide formal, easily-accessed structures for getting at them when, say, a teacher plans a syllabus or a student decides on a paper topic. In short, a crossreferenced user's guide or extensive discussions of organizing themes and dominant literary practices would make the nontraditional approach this anthology invites more manageable—and, perhaps, justify the book's high cost. Some of Pearsall's headnotes are quite helpful, however, in keying the entries to thematic interests and literary innovations. The introductions to each of the works by Chaucer, for example, discuss the...