Transforming Talk: the Problem with Gossip in Late Medieval England (review)

In its depiction of three female gossips surrounded by devils (one of them the recording demon, Tutivillus), Transforming Talk's cover illustration, from a fourteenth-century tracery light in Stanford-on-Avon Church, Northamptonshire, is the visual form of the book's basic premise, that 'idle talk and pastoral rhetoric are deeply intertwined' (p. 8). Susan Phillips is at pains to show that this is no simple matter. After briefly covering earlier approaches to gossip – anthropological, sociological, literary critical, and feminist – Phillips contends in her Introduction that it is limiting to focus only on the idea of gossip as transgressive when idle talk was 'both so problematic and so productive' (p. 6) during the late medieval period. Gossip had transformative, appropriating functions, she argues, changing itself into confession, as did, in turn, confession into gossip. It made sermons hot news, and confessors lovers. In the subsequent four chapters Phillips expands her argument, studying the ways that idle talk, or, as she also describes it, 'unofficial speech' (p. 10), informed and transformed both pastoral practice and literary strategy and production in this period.

Chapter one, '"Janglynge in cherche": Pastoral Practice and Idle Talk', examines the use of sermon exempla by preachers and penitential writers, 'to substitute authorized narratives for the idle tales of their audiences, [thus] simultaneously railing against and catering to their sinful tastes' (p. 17). Phillips mentions more texts in passing, but two in particular, the early fifteenth-century sermon cycle, Jacob's Well, and the popular penitential manual, Robert Mannyng's Handlyng Synne. Her discussion of Mannyng's consciousness that his exemplary practices, in their explicit exclusion of private information, are different from, yet, by implication, similar to, gossip, is the more interesting of the two. She continues with a study of the confession and its vulnerability to gossip via both garrulous priests and loquacious parishioners. To consider the issues, she uses, among other texts, Wrath's 'gossip stew' lines (Langland, Piers Plowman, B-text, ed. Schmidt, 156ff), the anonymous Book of Penance, and Dunbar's 'Ane murelandis man of vplandis mak'.

Phillips explores Chaucer's 'theory and practice of gossip', aiming to demonstrate 'the ways in which he takes idle talk not just as [the] subject of his poetry but also as a method for it' (p. 69), in chapter two. The first half of the chapter, discussing The House of Fame, is less worthwhile than this promises: Phillips's argument that Chaucer's exploration in HF of idle talk's characteristics 'leads to the discovery of new literary techniques' (p. 81) is somewhat circular. In the chapter's second part, she considers The Canterbury Tales as an implementation of the strategies developed in the HF. This discussion on the relations between gossip and poetic practice fares better, especially concerning the Man of Law's conflation of the Pierides (pp. 83–5); and the behaviour of Harry Bailly, the Host, as one who 'practices what he preaches against' (p. 86), deploys gossip to 'channel personal animus into narrative invention, and to persuade reluctant speakers to disclose their tales' (p. 89), and solicits the secrets of the Canon through his Yeoman (p. 92ff).

In chapter three, '"Sisters in schrift": Gossip's Confessional Kinship', Phillips's observations that in The Shipman's Tale the wife uses discursive tactics to replace content when she is about to confess to the monk, and that this promise of gossip unfulfilled resembles the strategy used in The House of Fame, are worth further thought (with medieval rhetorical textbooks in mind). The following discussion of Dunbar's Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo (a poem equally innovative in its exploration of the relationship between confession and gossip) is more laboured. As in the church confession, the Scottish work's basic structural unit is the question and answer, but The Tretis is more witty, the laughter of...