STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ‘‘earnest.’’ The texts thus reflect the increasingly dangerous environment for Lollard ideas after the Lancastrian usurpation. In the afterword to the book, Barr turns to Lydgate’s The Churl and the Bird as an example of a text that both attempts to ‘‘police’’ interpretation and challenges conventional social hierarchies. Her conclusion about this poem, which also serves as the conclusion to the book, is that ‘‘socioliterary practice is simultaneously material and endlessly open to interpretation’’ (p. 198). It is a somewhat abrupt ending for a book that has brought together so many disparate texts and their contexts, and it is one that, in my view, does not do justice to the many moments of insight to be found in each chapter. Nevertheless, readers will find much to engage them here in the book’s many close readings of medieval texts; these are insightful, careful, nuanced, and well worth reading. Maura B. Nolan University of Notre Dame Catherine Batt. Malory’s ‘‘Morte Darthur’’: Remaking Arthurian Tradition . New York: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. xxiii, 264. $49.95. Catherine Batt begins her excellent book on Malory’s Morte Darthur with a brief discussion of an engagement between two knights during the Hundred Years’ War. These knights, the Frenchman Clermont and the Englishman Chandos, bear similar names and identical heraldic devices . For Batt, the fluidity of signification demonstrated in this encounter , in which identities commingle and are simultaneously forced violently apart, serves as a metaphor for the relationship between the medieval Arthurian literary tradition and Malory’s Morte Darthur. Batt’s analysis of the encounter is both historical—she is interested in how these knights negotiate this sudden destabilization of signs—and selfreflexive , as she considers the role of the medievalist in reading such semiotic confusion. R. M. Lumiansky’s 1964 edited volume, Malory’s Originality—which, interestingly, Batt never mentions—in its reassessment of Malory’s sources, opened the door for a generation of scholars to consider the Morte Darthur as more than a condensed version of PAGE 360 360 .......................... 10906$ CH11 11-01-10 13:59:23 PS REVIEWS lengthy French romances, suggesting that it represented a kind of teleological conclusion to the Matter of Britain. Batt, however, moves in a new and exciting direction concerned with the interrelationship of Malory ’s text and its sources as sites of intertextual and mutually illuminating semiotic play. Although Batt offers some attention to the medieval social and political conditions that serve as the impetus for textual production, her primary interest is in the circulation of literary structures and traditions. Batt posits Malory as one in a series of readers whose engagement with the Arthurian literary heritage creates a text that is both reverential and subversive, a text that requires a rereading of its sources even as it revises them. She sees the Morte Darthur as a ‘‘compilation,’’ a collection of wide-ranging medieval French and English literary writings. She also, however, regards Malory as a skilled reader and interpreter whose revision of received materials results in changes of significant cultural consequence . But it is ultimately Batt herself whose reception of the Matter of Britain realizes a Morte Darthur more subtle and brilliant—more organized and coherent—than Malory could ever have imagined. Batt follows the organization of Eugene Vinaver’s edition of the Winchester manuscript, The Works of Sir Thomas Malory. But she thankfully resists engaging in the old and tired argument as to whether Winchester provides a more privileged glimpse of Malory’s intention than Caxton’s Morte Darthur. By sidestepping the controversy, Batt is able to write about the eight ‘‘books’’ of the Works both as individual entities and as portions of an interconnected whole. In Chapter 2, Batt considers the structuration of Arthurian ‘‘history,’’ suggesting that in his revision of Merlin, Malory sets the tone of his Arthuriad as one of ‘‘moral and narrative disjunction’’ (p. 59). Her assessment of the violence, particularly the sexual violence, of the Balin episode underscores the disturbing nature of Malory’s text. Batt argues for a complex hermeneutic in which ‘‘we as readers, together with the reader-narrator, encounter a vocabulary that offers only a fragmented knowledge of the Arthurian...