Reading Medieval Research Articles

Siân Echard and Stephen Partridge, eds., The Book Unbound: Editing and Reading Medieval Manuscripts and Texts. (Studies in Book and Print Culture.) Toronto; Buffalo, N.Y.; and London: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Pp. xxi, 236 plus black-and-white and color figures; black-and-white figures and tables. $50.

Siân Echard and Stephen Partridge, eds., The Book Unbound: Editing and Reading Medieval Manuscripts and Texts. (Studies in Book and Print Culture.) Toronto; Buffalo, N.Y.; and London: University of Toronto Press, 2004. Pp. xxi, 236 plus black-and-white and color figures; black-and-white figures and tables. $50.

Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object (review)

Reviews 217 Parergon 21.1 (2004) essays are very valuable in the examination of legal concepts of domestic violence in England, and it will be interesting to see how their conclusions work when tested in other medieval societies with different legal frameworks. The rest of the collection essentially deals with literary texts, apart from Anne Laskaya’s essay on illuminations of the apocalypse. As well as acknowledging that domestic violence was not a defined category as such in medieval societies, the articles on literary interpretations are interested in how we are modern readers interpret texts which we find highly problematic. How can episodes of rape, murder, dismemberment and abandonment be read in ways that allow the voices of medieval authors and readers to emerge while still recognising the abhorrent nature of some of the textual images? This is a point which is often challenging when teaching medieval texts to undergraduates and, although these essays are not aimed at undergraduates, some of the readings of violent episodes will be useful to those trying to deepen their students’ responses beyond initial abhorrence at the alienating images. In many ways this book works better than many collections of essays as a coherent response to a complex problem and does benefit from being read in its entirety. All the thought provoking essays will deepen our understanding of medieval violence, and also raise intriguing questions for others to explore in different societies and time periods. Understanding that violence is not static and has different meanings depending on chronological and geographical contexts is essential to our knowledge of past societies. This book is an important part of developing that understanding. Dianne Hall Department of History University of Melbourne Sears, Elizabeth and Thelma Thomas, eds, Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object, Ann Arbor, University of Michigan Press, 2002; paper; pp. xviii, 262; 67 b/w illustrations, 7 colour plates; RRP US$27.95; ISBN 0472067516. This book was conceived as a tribute to Ilene Forsyth. The editors invited eighteen medievalists, colleagues and friends of Forsyth’s to contribute a short essay which analyses an artwork of their own choosing. In recognition of Forsyth’s particular talent for visual analysis the editors emphasise the idea of 218 Reviews Parergon 21.1 (2004) reading the image. In short introductory essays they describe reading as more than formalism, with its attention to the physical qualities of the artwork, and more than iconographical analysis, with its search for the meaning of the content. Reading is a sophisticated process of ‘analyzing form and content in their interaction, in relation to the reconstructed circumstances of an artifact’s making and viewing’. When the contributions came in they seemed to furnish an example of how art history should be done. The editors decided to expand their scope and use medieval culture as a vantage point to look at the task of art history in general. The eighteen essays were divided into nine sub-groups, each with a two-page editorial, covering medieval sign theory, visual rhetoric, geometry and architectural design, audience, style and ideology, pictorial conventions, narrative, sacred images, and mimesis. This, then, is a book that looks inward in considerable detail at eighteen individual works, and outwards at the role and practice of the art historian. It will be of interest for students of the discipline to see how the contributors have gone about their task but perhaps the more lasting value of the book is that it provides close descriptions of works ranging from late antiquity to the Quattrocento , from textiles to an ivory comb to an altarpiece, all of which can be described as medieval. In the section headed ‘Audience’, Oleg Grabar looks at a bronze aquamanile in the shape of a bird, located in the Louvre. He points out that it is quite well known as an image, but the original function and context are no longer known. Information could be obtained in various ways. Grabar refers to technical analysis of the metallic surface, which could reveal what sort of liquid it was used for. This has apparently not yet taken place. Instead Grabar concentrates on the inscriptions, one in Latin and the other in Arabic, across...

Reading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object. Elizabeth Sears , Thelma K. Thomas

Previous articleNext article No AccessReviewsReading Medieval Images: The Art Historian and the Object. Elizabeth Sears , Thelma K. Thomas Susan Leibacher WardSusan Leibacher Ward Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 78, Number 4Oct., 2003 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0038713400101381 Views: 8Total views on this site Copyright 2003 The Medieval Academy of AmericaPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Eros and The Abyss: Reading Medieval Mystics in Postmodernity

In contemporary writings, nihilism is regularly figured as an abyss, contrasted with knowledge set upon secure foundations, and seen as a particular threat to theology in postmodemity. In medieval mystical writings and experience, however, the abyss was figured as the unfathomable depth of God. Each case, moreover, carries gender connotations: the abyss, in both medieval and postmodem writings, is linked with the womb (and thus with love and creativity or with fear and dread) while the solidity of foundations is, metonymically, manly reliability. I shall argue that reading medieval mystics in postmodemity allows us to destabilise postmodem metaphors (and their gender assumptions), to reconsider the way in which theological language works, and to look at questions of nihilism in a different light.

Magister Amoris: The 'Roman de la Rose' and Vernacular Hermeneutics by Alastair Minnis

MLR, 98.2, 2003 455 the impact ofthe article at the end with an over-hasty and sketchy examination of other female characters. Donald Maddox concentrates his attention upon the Bel Inconnu and upon the 'Fier Baiser' theme in particular. Of special note is the exploration of the significance of the heraldic emblems contained in the text, where Maddox's persistence has brought important results. Sara Sturm-Maddox is concerned with the fortunes of the Arthurian tradition in Sicily and more specifically with Floriant et Florete, and tries to tease out the meaning ofthe end of the verse romance. The article not so far mentioned is a study by Louis Gemenne, which describes an experiment centred on the reading of Marie de France's Bisclavret by a group of mainly 16-yearold pupils in a Belgian school. This essay perhaps illustrates the strengthand weakness of the whole collection: it has its own interest, but does not relate to or genuinely invite reflection on the other contributions. The Arthurian theme suggested by the title loosely covers all the essays printed here, the individual contributions are all worthy in their differentways, but the collection remains a miscellany, lacking a truly distinctive theme which would have increased the resonances of its separate parts. University of Durham Geoffrey Bromiley Magister Amoris: The 'Roman de la Rose' and Vernacular Hermeneutics. By Alastair Minnis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2001. xv + 352pp. ?50. ISBN o19 -818754-8 With this book Alastair Minnis makes another substantial contribution to the study of medieval concepts of authorship and literaryhermeneutics. This detailed examination of the reception of the Roman de la Rose in the later Middle Ages situates the Rose and the diverse reactions it provoked in the context of medieval theories of language and meaning and the study of erotic and satiric literature, particularly the works of Ovid. Minnis stresses Ovid's importance as a learned poet of love, a magister amoris, whose literary oeuvre comprises seemingly contradictory elements. Works attributed to Ovid during the Middle Ages, the Amores, the Ars amatoria, the Remedia amoris, and the De vetula, as well as the Metamorphoses, variously incite the reader to erotic love, instruct him or her in how to proceed, warn against its dangers, and portray it as a moral pitfall to be avoided at all cost. The complexities and ambiguities of Ovid's love poetry stimulated a lively commentary tradition that was already well developed by the time of Jean de Meun's continuation of the Roman de la Rose. Minnis shows that medieval readings of the Rose must be read in the larger context of medieval literary studies in general, and in particular with reference to the reception of Ovid. As Minnis states with regard to the celebrated querelle initiated by Christine de Pizan, Jean de Meun was widely viewed as a medieval vernacular Ovid; the question was whether the Rose should be read as an art or a remedy of love. In his analysis of the Rose and the controversies that itaroused, Minnis explores the poem's unstable mix of competing discourses: the use of integumentumor decorous concealment of harsh and obscene material on the one hand, and on the other the 'naked truth' of satire, in which all is bared foran effectthat is both comic and didactic . It is the very instability and inconsistency of the Rose, a masterful and brilliant inconsistency, that accounts both forthe fascination with which it gripped its readers and forthe horror with which some of them reacted. Minnis shows that Jean's critics and his defenders alike drew on scholastic commentary traditions, differingonly in their means of applying these techniques to the Rose. Thus for some it was a bold satire, and for others a shameful treatise on seduction. Minnis's own view is that Jean's humour in the Rose is not subversive but utterly mainstream. Its comedy derives from a perspective that completely accepts the 456 Reviews dominant culture while none the less seeing and perhaps even revelling in its inter? nal tensions, paradoxes, and absurdities. Minnis points out that a paradox central to medieval education, in which Ovidian love poetry played a prominent role, was that boys were simultaneously...

Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer by Bruce W. Holsinger

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER great sea, and getting through it requires certain skills, as Hollander rightly teaches us. But rather than going straight to life-saving, we should first learn to take pleasure in swimming. Winthrop Wetherbee Cornell University Bruce W. Holsinger. Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer. Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001. Pp. xxiv, 472. 21 illustrations , 3 figures. $65.00 cloth, $24.95 paper. This is a joyful, often dazzling study of the musical body in medieval culture. Holsinger’s subject covers the sensuous embodiment of medieval musical performance but also medieval visions of singing bodies and a range of metaphors based on the musical body, above all that of Christ’s crucified body as the taut strings of a harp or lyre. The book takes us from Clement of Alexandria’s vision of the New Song resonating through the bodies of the faithful, Peter Damian’s claim that chanting ten psalms is the equivalent of receiving a thousand blows with the whip, and Augustine’s gradual softening of his early Manichaean hostility to music’s carnality, through the erotic pleasures of Hildegard of Bingen’s chant and Notre Dame polyphony, to literary images of music, including the polyphonic singing of Chaucer’s Pardoner and Summoner, the debased chorus of the snoring and farting Symkyn and his family in the Reeve’s Tale, and the rational discipline of teaching plainsong that the Prioress’s ‘‘litel clergeon’’ avoids. Music, Body, and Desire filled me with gratitude—for its rich and surprising bibliography, its unusual insights , its attention to Latin wordplay, the lucidity with which it explains medieval notation and other musicological technicalities, and its sheer gall—as when Holsinger characterizes Augustine’s claim in the Confessions that God had freed him from his sensuous enjoyment of music as ‘‘the self-assured defensiveness of an addict’’ (p. 74). In his introduction, Holsinger tackles the philosophical question of whether music exists prior to performance. Rejecting the Platonic and Pythagorean understanding of music as transcendental harmony that can only be stained or tainted by its embodiment, Holsinger argues for 380 ................. 10286$ CH15 11-01-10 13:55:05 PS REVIEWS the materialist claim that music only exists when embodied. Embodied music, however, is inherently sensual and disruptive. Music, Body, and Desire is thus an explicit challenge to the vision of ordered hierarchy D. W. Robertson propounded in his famous Preface to Chaucer, although in its subtle allegories it is also an indirect tribute. (The suggestion that the turn to theory of the last twenty years constitutes ‘‘a final break from Robertsonianism’’ (p. 28) is one of the few moments of naı̈vete in this very sophisticated book.) So, in his exegesis of the Prioress’s Tale, Holsinger interprets the grain the abbot removes from the boy’s tongue not as a soul winowed from the body but as the ‘‘soul miraculously enduring within the body’’ (p. 289, emphasis in original). This reading might also be called incarnational. One of Holsinger’s central claims is that medieval theologians and musicians did not monolithically reject embodiment but sometimes explored and even embraced it. He makes a strong case. A good many will respond with skepticism to Holsinger’s initial claim that in the middle ages ‘‘the intermingling of same-sex voices in plainchant and polyphony allows composers and performers to explore through sonority unsanctioned forms of desire’’ (p. 1). As Allen Frantzen has argued in Before The Closet: Same-Sex Love From Beowulf to Angels in America, (1998), in a passage cited by Holsinger, the drive in some recent criticism ‘‘to show that everything is about sex, same-sex in particular , especially when it claims to be about something else’’ has sometimes led to readings that demonstrate ‘‘the ingenuity of the critics and the malleability of medieval texts,’’ but little more. Holsinger himself has on occasion allowed his desire for medieval texts to express coded sexual transgression to run away with him and he uses Music, Body, and Desire as an occasion to modify some of his earlier claims about Hildegard. This time round Holsinger is not just preaching to the choir...

Acadia University

K.S. Whetter (Ph. D. Wales) teaches first-year literature and medieval literature in Acadia University’s English Department. His principal areas of expertise and interest are medieval literature, especially the medieval Arthurian tradition, Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, and Middle English romance, but he is also interested in genre theory, and epic and heroic literature (both medieval and classical). He has published in the Bibliographical Bulletin of the International Arthurian Society, Reading Medieval Studies (forthcoming), a collection of essays from Trent University’s Department of Ancient History and Classics, and a collection of essays entitled Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses (forthcoming from Boydell & Brewer). He has also appeared on BBC’s Time Team as the Malory expert for their In Search of King Arthur special.

Claire E. Honess, ed., Dante: Current Trends in Dante Studies. (Reading Medieval Studies, 27, Special Issue.) Reading: Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Reading, 2001. Paper. Pp. v, 250; 26 black-and-white figures.

Claire E. Honess, ed., Dante: Current Trends in Dante Studies. (Reading Medieval Studies, 27, Special Issue.) Reading: Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies, University of Reading, 2001. Paper. Pp. v, 250; 26 black-and-white figures.

Shipwreck as Heresy: Placing Gongora's Poetry in the Wake of Renaissance Epic, Fray Luis, and the Christian Kabbala

OF the scholars who have promoted the reading of Gongora's long lyric poem Soledades by publishing new editions in the twentieth century, only John Beverley has presented an interpretation which clearly links the Soledades to theoretical concerns of the contemporary literary scene.1 Instead of setting up the main questions facing readers as philological problems or problems of appropriate comprehension, which has the effect of drawing the scholar into an exclusive world of commentaries and debating gongoristas, in his Against Literature Beverley opens up a paradox the heart of the Spanish Baroque which merits further exploration: Gongorism, resisted and denounced as heretical in the metropolis (the Inquisition prohibited the sale of the first commercial edition of Gongora's poetry in 162, becomes in the colonies a quasi-official aesthetic manner for more than a century and continues to be celebrated even today as a marker of Latin American cultural identity. (27) Beverley argues that in the Spanish colonies, Gongora's poetry became central to an institution of Literature used to culturize and to develop aesthetic sense and character. In short, it took part in what became the dominant pedagogical reason for being of humanism: humanists themselves, with their foundation in the revival of classical rhetoric, were always aware that the purpose of their pedagogy was to produce the subject form of the ruling class (or classes) (31). This essay is a response to one of the questions Beverley's paradox elicits: how could Gongora's censored poetry, attacked as fragmentary and harshly critical of Spanish colonial glory at its first appearance, come to appear orthodox and allied with the projects of an elite humanism in the colonies? The unique qualities of the poetic voice in the Soledades suggest strong resistance to such an appropriation: the vaguely defined protagonist/pilgrim problematizes the representation of a rational subject, and the work itself contains no claim to an enduring existence as a text which would extend Gongora!s fame and authority as a model poet.2 Yet, undoubtedly the phenomenon of gongorism, which imitated Gongora's conspicuous use of forms, figurative language, and intertexual references, exceeded and overshadowed the implications of his poetry's subtler qualities. In order to suggest reasons for both the denunciation of Gongora's poetry, and the ease with which it becomes a quasiofficial aesthetic manner, one would have to return to the metropolis and closely investigate the peculiar characteristics of his poetic heresy. I would like to do this in two overlapping contexts: first within the context of Renaissance imitation of Classical epic, and secondly among some of the multiple poetic discourses, both religious and secular, circulating within Spain around the turn of the seventeenth century when Gongora!s texts were being produced. When Gongora's work is examined in its milieu it becomes clear that classical, humanist, and theological threads are intersecting there with a complexity which frustrates any desire for monological discourses. But perhaps the most surprising quality of Gongora's texts is their representation of poetry's failures: the foregrounding of poetry's relationship to violence, irrationality, linguistic difference and failed attempts at representation. Gongora was known during his lifetime as the best poet of his generation in Spain, comparable to Tasso in Italy, whose work he knew and drew from, and Edmund Spenser in England. All three wrote innovative and influential works in the pastoral mode. But what clearly differentiates Gongora from the other two is that both Tasso and Spenser went on from their pastoral works, Aminta and The Shepheardes Calender, to write monumental, allegorical epics, following the model for progression through the genres set up by medieval readings of Virgil. Their Gerusalemme Liberata and The Faerie Queen combine definitions of national identity with Christian and chivalric themes, just as Camoes immortalized the Portuguese discovery and conquest with his Os Lusiadas. …

Contrary Things: Exegesis, Dialectic, and the Poetics of Didacticism. By Catherine Brown. Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. xviii + 209 pp. $45.00 cloth.

Contrary Things: Exegesis, Dialectic, and the Poetics of Didacticism. By Catherine Brown. Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. xviii + 209 pp. $45.00 cloth. - Volume 69 Issue 2

Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality, Hermeneutics and English Poetry (review)

302 Short Notices Tinkle, Theresa, Medieval Venuses and Cupids: Sexuality, Hermeneutics a English Poetry (Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture), Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1996; cloth; pp. 294; R.R.P. AUS$64.95; ISBN 0804725152. [Distributed in Australia by Cambridge University Press] Medieval Venuses and Cupids are popular figures in medieval poetry. Nevertheless, modern commentators have largely perceived them as binary formulations of 'good' and 'evil' or as a 'courtly couple'. Theresa Tinkle demonstrates that this simple theoretical stance greatly limits any interrogation of the semiotic potential of the mythical deities. Her analysis shows some of the ways that the deities reveal both simple and problematic discourses about medieval sexualities and hermeneutics. For example, mythographic Venus can be a historical w o m a n or a virtue. Cupid can be either male or female, old or young. Tinkle's analysis successfully generates a dialogue between discourses of medieval poetry and mythographic writing in order to ^be alert both to dialectics between texts and traditions, and to dialogues among discourses within a single text' (p. 40). This study underlines the necessity to read the deities within a framework of multiple significations. Subsequently, she draws on a wide-ranging variety of medieval intellectual traditions and conventions on the one hand and modern cultural and feminist analyses on the other. Venerian and Cupidean mythography exposes a variety of competing discourses such as etymology, astrology and physiology. Tinkle's excellent first chapter analyses the prevailing critical readings of mythography and suggests a new interpretive model. The second chapter performs a rigorous analysis of a selection of the most representative and influential mythographic texts from the fifth to the fifteenth century and foreshadows the appeal these texts might have for poets. Selected are Fulgentius, Isidore of Seville, Alberic, John Ridewall, Pierre Bersuire, Boccaccio, Christine de Pizan. Chapters Three and Four explore the relationship between mythography and iconology from classical Latin traditions to the Middle Ages and include analyses of iconographic and poetically-inscribed Venuses, for example, Venus anadyomeme. Chapters Five to Seven are directly concerned with the relations between poetry and mythographic hermeneutics and concentrate on Chaucer, Gower and Lydgate but also discuss the Venerian 303 poetics of Boccaccio, de M e u n and Ovid amongst others. The final chapter examines the development of Venerian patronage in Chaucerian English poetry through Chaucer's Venus w h o represents the 'classicizing dream of vernacular sensuousness and eloquence' (p. 202), whereas Cupidean patronage is associated with French medieval poetry. This book is compulsory reading as m u c h for its outstanding intellectual scope as its careful methodology. Particularly praiseworthy i s Tinkle's fruitful uses of the hermeneutics of medieval mythographic writing and Chaucerian applications of Venus and Cupid to reflect upon current critical and canonical practices in the academy. Helen Hickey Department of English with Cultural Studies University ofMelbourne ...

Writing the Dead: Death and Writing Strategies in the Western Tradition (review)

250 Reviews and the political situation it is surprising just h o w untarnished is Milton's final preference for a republic, and the old argument that Satan uses republican rhetoric is countered by Norbrook's demonstration that his imagery becomes more monarchist and courtly after his initial rebellion. Marvell is assessed in more familiar ways as one interested in the phenomenon of ambiguity itself, but Norbrook's narrative approach, emphasising that his protagonists could not have fore-known the course of events, helps to explain Marvell's calculated prevarications. For him, 'the English republic is not a static, traditional entity but a project still in process. H e could not have k n o w n h o w soon it was to hit the rocks' (p. 298). H e was simply a different temperament and a different kind of poet from the strongly aligned Wither and Milton. Writing the English Republic is the most consistently pro-republican account so far written of the Commonwealth period and its place in history. Given Norbrook's formidable gifts of dense historical scholarship and finely honed linguistic and stylistic alertness, his o w n revival of parrhesia ('open, bold speech', p. 127), his book lays d o w n a vigorous challenge to those historians and critics w h o assume that 'balance' and 'objectivity' are guaranteed by maintaining conservative positions. R. S. White Department of English The University of Western Australia Petrucci, Armando, Writing the Dead: Death and Writing Strategies in th Western Tradition (Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture), trans. Michael Sullivan, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998; cloth; pp. xviii, 163; 64 b / w illustrations; R.R.P. £25.00. [Distributed in Australia by Cambridge University Press.] This book, first published in Italian as Le scritture ultime: ldeologi morte e strategic dello scrivere nella tradizione occidentale (1995), is might call a coffee-table book for academics. It has an interesting subject , funerary epigraphy from Attic Greece to the present in the Western world, and an expressed objective of discovering the links between the kinds of funerary writing a society practises (or does not practise) and 251 the dominant social culture that authorises them. However, given the vast sweep of Petrucci's subject, his book, although well researched, is bound to be somewhat superficial and often partial in the material it surveys. Even so, it brings together some fascinating cultural continuities, especially between the antique world and the various moments in European, and particularly Italian, history w h e n antique funerary writing, or what was then understood to represent it, was revived and reinterpreted. Petrucci is a professor of Latin palaeography, so this book is not surprisingly strongest on continuities and differences across the centuries in kinds of writing using Latin or its vernacular derivatives on funerary monuments and in the written literature of death. O n e of the central questions in the book is about w h o in any society has 'a right to a written death'. Most of the answers, given the book's scope and length (only 164 pages), are predictable enough, and do not probe very far below the surface of the individual societies surveyed. By far the richest evidence is amassed in pursuit of Petrucci's central question posed of the antique world and medieval and modern funerary epigraphy in Italy. Although he includes some discussion of other parts of Europe (principally France, Germany and England), it is small in comparison with the space devoted to Italy. Towards the end of the volume there is an interesting chapter on funerary writing in colonial America. The final chapter is a bit of a squib, necessarily so as the author documents and explains the twentieth-century decline in funerary epigraphy, concluding with a rather limp hope that it m a y revive somehow. Behind Petrucci's history of writing the dead there seems to lie the unquestioned assumption that written grave markers or memorials, on which the verbal text is both clear and central, are superior to those on which other kinds of signs and icons dominate. This is an arguable position , but I would have preferred to have the author present evidence for i t . As...

REVIEWS

Journal Article REVIEWS Get access DAVID WALLACE. Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy. Pp. xx+556+11 plates (Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture). Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997. £40. PETER BROWN PETER BROWN University of KentCanterbury Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of English Studies, Volume 49, Issue 196, November 1998, Pages 497–499, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/49.196.497 Published: 01 November 1998

Keith Sidwell. Reading Medieval Latin

Keith Sidwell. Reading Medieval Latin

Literary History and the Challenge of Philology: The Legacy of Erich Auerbach (review)

REVIEWS The problem, though, is that these activities are generally not an integrated part ofour lives. "These two activities—scholarly and political—ofone and the same person, suffer equally as a result ofbeing isolated from each other," says Todorov. "But is it possible to imagine a relationship between the two other than an alternation (scholar from nine to five, militant from five to nine)?" (209). His response is "yes," ifwe are willing to adopt a particular stance on what it is to be an intellectual . This stance involves refusing to see "truth reduced either to the pure adequation offacts that die scholar demands or to truth-revelation (vérité de révélation), the faith ofthe militant; rather, he aims for truth-disclosure (vérité de dévoilement) as a consensus toward which one moves by accepting self-examination and dialogue " (210). Here Todorov ties the role ofthe intellectual back to his earlier comments on die relationship between science and ethics: "I therefore perceive a goal shared by the arts and the human sciences . . . which usually practice such different forms and discourses: to reveal and eventually modify the network ofvalues that act as regulating principles in the life ofa cultural group" (210). For Todorov, "the intellectual is the one whojudges the real in comparison to an ideal" (21 5)—"intellectuals are not content to belong to society: rather they act on it, by attempting to make it closer to the ideal in which they already believe" (217). Todorov closes The Morals ofHistory by evoking the image ofSocrates as gadfly, saying that "To play die role ofme gadfly, to be the goad in society; this what the role ofmodern intellectuals could be, ifthey are not too afraid ofsuffering Socrates' fate" (2 1 8). I have no doubt that The Morals ofHistory will be significant reading for comparatists ofall stripes, even though the major themes ofcolonialism and anticolonialism , the logic ofconquest and ethnocentrism, and the outcome of democracy and the future oflate capitalism may notprimafacie be of interest to all ofus. While I do not believe that Todorov has presented a convincinggeneral philosophical argument for the interdependence offacts and values, his studies ofthe particular ways in which fact and values interrelate in "(hi)stories" are illuminating and rich. I highly recommend this important book. Jeffrey R. DiLeo Indiana University, Bloomington SETH LERER, ed. Literary History and the Challenge ofPhilology: The Legacy ofErich Auerbach. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1996. xii + 301 pp. Although mis book appears in the series Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture, it is ofinterest to a wider audience, and in particular to comparatists, for Auerbach was a seminal scholar in this discipline in the United States during the post-war years, when he taught first at Penn State University and then at Yale until his death in 1957. This volume consists oftwenty-four papers delivered at a conference held at Stanford in October 1992 to mark the centennial ofAuerbach's birth. It is one of a spate ofsuch anniversary markers that have recently appeared. Its five parts are entitled: "The Everyday and History"; "Philology, Language, and History"; "Figurai History, Historical Figures"; "Turning Points in Literary History"; and "LegaVoIi 21 (1997): 158 THE COMPAKATIST cies." Uniting these sections are the central concerns of the collection with the reassessment ofAuerbach's place and role in the development ofliterary criticism in me United States, the transformations in the understanding ofhistory over the past forty years, the problem of Auerbach's methodology in Mimesis, and his relationship to modernism. In contrast to the either flat or romantic early reviews ofAuerbach's major work, this volume attempts to take a hard-headed (though not hard-hearted) new look from the vantage point ofthe present. In so doing, it not only revalues and renegotiates, but also repoliticizes Auerbach's heritage by assimilating it to the critical preoccupations ofthe 1990s. The focus ofLiterary History and the Challenge ofPhilology is clearly Mimesis , although other of Auerbach's writings also come under some discussion, from his early and only book devoted to a single author, Dante, to his late essay on Baudelaire. (An appendix listing Auerbach's works chronologically would have been helpful.) Despite its omission of any American authors, Mimesis...

The Boundaries of Charity: Cistercian Culture and Ecclesiastical Reform, 1098-1180 by Martha G. Newman

772book reviews and the role of women, and investigations of the manifestations of popular piety with their pagan overtones and of heretical movements, in particular of Bogomilism. The methodology is synthetic, solidly based on the primary sources, often effectively summarized, and supported by a thorough and conscientious weighing -up of secondary sources. The book is an exceUent introduction to a very wide variety of topics and writers, presented with objectivity, sensitive appraisal , and admirable clarity. Despite the wide sweep and complex narrative the overaU theme remains dominant and rises in intensity and interest as the work proceeds.The author is helped partly by the great work of his predecessors (especiaUy the French Assumptionists like Paul Gautier and Jean Darrouz ès), partly by his British contemporaries (outstanding works developing Ln greater depth some of the topics treated here have appeared recently from the pens of Paul Magdalino and Rosemary Morris). The writer is primarily a historian, and theologians should not expect a speculative analytic approach. He also suffers from a blind spot as far as liturgy is concerned. OccasionaUy one may question certain assumptions, e.g., the downplaying of the role of clerics in education, or the importance given to some sources, like Neophytos of Cyprus. Certain themes cry out to be investigated further, such as the work of Balsamon, who surely deserves a book to himseU. Again, some patterns are read into a series of events which are not seU-evident, as when the Church is cast in a somewhat sinister power role in relation to baptism and marriage. But the overall judgment cannot be in doubt: the author has confirmed his mastery in the field of Byzantine studies, and this volume is to be welcomed as a great work. Joseph A. Munitiz Campion Hall, Oxford The Boundaries of Charity: Cistercian Culture and Ecclesiastical Reform, 1098-1180. By Martha G. Newman. [Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture.] (Stanford: Stanford University Press. 1996. Pp. xx, 388. $49.50.) The Cistercian Order in the twelfth century has often seemed paradoxical: an order whose leaders preached retreat from the world at the same time as they became involved in many of the major poUtical and ecclesiastical events of the period, an order based on radical poverty whose houses became very wealthy. Scholars once spoke of a conflict between"ideal"and"reality,"in the assumption that within its first two or three generations members of the Order, faced with pressing poUtical and economic reaUties, were forced to abandon their earlier ideals. Within the last ten years or so, however, it has come to be understood that this approach both creates an artificial "ideal" which in many ways owes more to twentieth-century concepts ofwithdrawal and poverty than to twelfth- book reviews773 century concepts, and necessitates postulating "decadence" in a period, the second haU of the twelfth century, when Cistercian prestige was in fact at its highest. Martha Newman, building on this earUer work, carries it further by incorporating for the first time Cistercian theology into a discussion of the monks' political and economic activities. Her central, eminently convincing argument is that the ways that the monks interacted with the world around them can best be understood as the product of the monasteries' internal culture.This culture, she points out, was created in a constant dialogue with the cultures of the secular aristocracy and of the developing schools, because new Cistercian converts came to the cloister not as boys but as young knights or scholars. Thus Newman suggests that Cistercian culture should be seen not as a complete rejection of the physical world but rather as an attempt to redeem and reform that world. Just as theological discourses on the Song of Solomon by men like Bernard of Clairvaux used the language ofphysical love to describe the love between God and His people, so the Cistercians used the unity created both between monks within a house and between the individual houses of the Order to serve as a model for what the world might strive to be. The primary element of this Cistercian culture, according to Newman, was caritas, the love (or "charity" of the title) that tied together monks, dUferent houses, and indeed the whole Christian...

Langland’s Musical Reader: Liturgy, Law, and the Constraints of Performance

Langland's Musical Reader: Liturgy, Law, and the Constraints of Performance Bruce W. Holsinger University ofColorado "Our songs have become laws." -Plato, The Laws Rarely h,s a litera,y wock esrnped ch, idcologirnl grnsp of ics author as quickly as did William Langland's Piers Plowman. Within a few decades of their composition, the three versions of the poem at­ tracted an astonishingly wide range of responses from a number of En­ glish writers who took the work as a justification for their own articu­ lation of religious and political protest. The B-text initially circulated within what some have recently described as a "London coterie," the members of which included the bureaucratic functionary Thomas Usk and, perhaps, the increasingly prominent London poet Geoffrey Chau­ cer, who may have composed The House ofFame after encountering the work shortly before 1380. 1 Soon thereafter, however, allusions to Piers Plowman appear in two letters associated with the Peasants' Revolt of I am grateful to the staff of the Students Room at the British Library for their assis­ tance and toJohn Bowers, Anna Brickhouse, A. S. G. Edwards, Andrew Galloway, Rich­ ard Firth Green, Ralph Hanna, William Kuskin, Jana Mathews, Derek Pearsall, Wendy Sease, and Emily Steiner for their helpful suggestions. 1 Ralph Hanna III, "On the Versions of Piers Plozl'/Jzan." in Plirstting History: Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts, Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1996), pp. 236-37; see also Hanna, William Langland (Al­ dctshot, Hams.: Variorum; Brookfield, Vt.: Ashgate, 1993), pp. 23-24; and Kathryn Kerby-Fulton and StevenJustice, "Langlandian Reading Circles and the Civil Service in London and Dublin, 1380-1427," New Medieval Literatures 1 (1997): 59-83. A much more skeptical appraisal of the evidence for Usk's knowledge of Langland is forthcoming from John Bowers in Yearbook ofLangland Studies. On Langland and the House ofFame, see most recently Frank Grady, "Chaucer Reading Langland: The House ofFame," SAC 18 (1996): 3-23. 99 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER 1381.2 By the early fifteenth century, several heterodox writers had re­ cruited Piers Plowman into what John Bowers terms a "renegade" textual community, attesting to a general tendency among later authors to view the work as primarily a political document that would lend prestige to their own critiques of church, law, and government.' While Langland's own positions on the controversies of his day have never been particu­ larly easy to pin down, many of his poem's earliest readers sought to enlist its befuddled dreamer and laboring protagonist as vocal propo­ nents for the necessity of dissent. This essay proposes a new addition to the immediate vernacular leg­ acy of Piers Plowman. I shall argue that the so-called "Choristers' La­ ment," a little-studied alliterative satire on the woes ofmusical learning within an English monastic institution, represents a sophisticated but hitherto unrecognized response to Langland's poem. (The "Lament" is newly edited and annotated in the Appendix.') Provocative evidence for the argument that follows can be found in the notes to Skeat's 1886 parallel-text edition of Piers, and in fact the topic was first suggested to me by an entry in the Middle English Dictionary. Among the most prominent obstacles that arguments for direct liter­ ary influence must inevitably confront are those of dating: while the earliest likely date of the B-text is 1377, the "Choristers' Lament" has been dated anywhere from circa 1300 to the middle ofthe fifteenth cen­ tury.5 A new estimate by Ralph Hanna, based in part on an assessment 1 Steven Justice, \Ylriting and Rebellion: England in 1381 (Berkeley: University of Cali­ fornia Press, 1994), p. 129.Recent work on Piers Plouman and the Rising includes John Bowers, "Piers Plowman and the Police: Notes Towards a History of the Wycliffite Langland," Yearbook ofLangland Studies 6 (1992), esp.pp.2-10; Susan Crane, "The Writ­ ing Lesson of 1381," in Barbara Hanawalt and David Wallace, eds., Chaucer's England: Literature in Historical Context (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), esp. pp.211-16; Richard Firth Green, "John Ball's Letters: Literary History and Historical Literature," in Chaucer's England. pp. 176-200; and Anne...

Chaucerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy by David Wallace

REVIEWS terdependence of popular devotion and official promotion in e�en the most highly politicized canonization processes. By the fifteenth century a majority of modern saints venerated in even the larger urban centres of Europe by the most well established religious orders had not been canonized, so expensive and unpromising had the process become. Al­ though Vauchez interprets this as a failure on the Church's part to recon­ cile the official, the local, and the popular, even these local cults could only work ifthe laity as well as the bishop and his minions wanted them to work. Further research on individual local cults by scholars such as Aviad Kleinberg has somewhat complicated this picture, and its overly generalized definition of the "popular." However, like Eamon Duffy's work on late-medieval English devotion, Vauchez's study stands as a challenge to the binaries that literary scholars (including myself) have sometimes assumed in analyzing medieval religious culture, and makes provocative reading for this reason alone. NICHOLAS WATSON University of Western Ontario DAVID WALLACE. Chaztcerian Polity: Absolutist Lineages and Associational Forms in England and Italy. Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture se­ ries. Stanford, Conn.: Stanford University Press, 1997. Pp. xix, 555. $55.00. At the turn ofthe present decade, a number ofinfluential Chaucer stud­ ies, appearing in quick succession, wrought important changes in the way Americans, at least, understand and teach the poet. Carolyn Din­ shaw's Chaucer's Sexual Poetic (1989), Paul Strohm's Social Chaucer (1989), H. Marshall Leicester Jr.'s The Disenchanted Self (1990), and Lee Pat­ terson's Chaucer and the Subject ofHistory (1991) brought gender and psy­ choanalytic theory, deconstruction, and Ricardian social, political, eco­ nomic, and institutional history to bear on the Chaucerian corpus in deeply enlightening (and to some, deeply unsettling) ways. David Wallace's Chaucerian Polity now takes its place in this elite group ofChaucerian blockbusters. Its major contribution is to contextu­ alize Chaucer doubly as a political poet: more immediately in the con­ text ofRicardian England, but (and this is Wallace's special claim to our 397 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER attention and gratitude) more broadly within the orbit ofthe politics of trecento northern Italy, and thus of the Italian humanism (not just the poetic production) of Petrarch and Boccaccio, which reflects the con­ frontations and crises at the center of trecento political theory and practice. Wallace starts from the major political fact oftrecento Italian politics: the struggle for mastery of northern Italy between Florence and Milan, a struggle with profound implications for the subsequent history of western Europe."Florence typically celebrated its own sense ofrepubli­ can libertas by developing ...an associational ideology, suggesting that all inhabitants of the city-state share equal footing on a lateral plane. " By contrast, for "northern Italian despotisms ofthe late Trecento[,} [t}he chiefideological vector ...is vertical, one-way, and downward descend­ ing," and "generates ideological forms that, like their associational coun­ terparts, are reproduced at both local and national levels" (p.2). In other words, the political struggle conditions the perspectives of the first generation ofhumanist writers and specifically provides the ba­ sic contrast between Petrarch, whose writings reflect his association with the Visconti and other despotic signori, and Boccaccio, who worked and wrote for a Florentine commune governed, between 1343 and 1378, by an often uneasy coalition of disparate economic and social groups. Chaucer, both by his firsthand observation of Florence (1373) and Lombardy (1378), and by his reading of Petrarch and Boccaccio, under­ stood the issues at stake in the struggle between the two types of polity. In addition, "Chaucer's experience in seeking to establish and stabilize a distinctive poetics" is complicated by the "complex and conflicted" nature of "his own political positioning ...at the intersection of royal, magnate, and mercantile worlds," and his exposure to "a dizzying suc­ cession of polities, from the broadest-based associational model (peasant uprising) to the narrowest form ofhierarchy (the tyranny of Richard II). " Accordingly, "he functions within both associational and hierarchic forms; in responding to the exceptional complexity of fourteenth­ century English polity he is at once the poet ofFlorence and Lombardy" (p.64), engaged in "testing ... the structures (substructures and anti­ structures) of...

Keith Bate, Anne Curry, Christopher Hardman, and Peter Noble, editors. Medieval Women in Southern England. (Reading Medieval Studies, Volume XV.) Reading, U.K.: The University of Reading. 1989. Pp. 123. £6.50.

Keith Bate, Anne Curry, Christopher Hardman, and Peter Noble, editors. Medieval Women in Southern England. (Reading Medieval Studies, Volume XV.) Reading, U.K.: The University of Reading. 1989. Pp. 123. £6.50.

Malcolm Barber, Patricia McNulty, and Peter Noble, eds., East Anglian and Other Studies Presented to Barbara Dodwell. (Reading Medieval Studies, 11.) Reading, Eng.: Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies, Reading University, 1985. Paper. Pp. vii, 141; illustrated.

Malcolm Barber, Patricia McNulty, and Peter Noble, eds., East Anglian and Other Studies Presented to Barbara Dodwell. (Reading Medieval Studies, 11.) Reading, Eng.: Graduate Centre for Medieval Studies, Reading University, 1985. Paper. Pp. vii, 141; illustrated.