The Poetry of Praise (review)

An episode in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) exemplifies modern attitudes toward medieval praise poetry. The Thopas-like Sir Robin sets out on a quest, listening with increasing unease while an irritating minstrel lauds his bravery in the face of future horrors. When challenged by a huge three-headed knight, “brave Sir Robin” scarpers; his minstrel now sings cheerily, “When danger reared its ugly head / he bravely turned his tail and fled.” The medieval rhetoric of praise almost inevitably seems to us formulaic, insincere, and ripe for comic irony or bathos.

The key argument of John Burrow’s book is that rhetorics of praise and blame are integral to premodern poetics. With characteristic clarity, and drawing on his extensive engagement with medieval English literature, Burrow suggests that praise should be read in ways more serious, less ironic, than modern readers are wont to, if we are fully to appreciate its tone and texture. Since praise “is no longer a prime function of poetic activity” (3), we search for undercurrents, if not wholesale undermining, where genuine admiration or awe is a more historically appropriate reading.

Chapter 1 surveys classical understandings of laus (epainos) and vituperatio (psogos), classified by Aristotle in the third branch of rhetoric, the demonstrative or epideictic. Central to praise was auxesis, or amplificatio—augmentation both in the sense of lengthening and of gilding the description of a hero, object, or event. Burrow traces these categories in medieval rhetorical treatises such as those of Matthew of Vendôme, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, John of Garland, and Hermann the German, closing with Benvenuto da Imola’s commentary on Dante, which cites Hermann’s Averroistic Poetics as saying that “every poem and every poetic utterance is either praise or blame; for every action and every trait of character turns on nothing but either virtue or vice” (23). This dichotomous and morally active tradition, Burrow argues, forms a vital substratum of vernacular poetry.

Chapter 2, on “Old English, especially Beowulf,” surveys laudatory verse to God (Caedmon’s Hymn; the Advent Lyrics; Daniel), before turning to military heroes. The Battle of Maldon, for example, distinguishes between praise for the brave and blame for the cowardly sons of Odda. But then there is Byrhtnoth’s ofermod, which Burrow briefly ponders, suggesting that reckless boldness may yet be praiseworthy in an epideictic mode. Similar complications are writ large in Beowulf, whose formulae of superlative praise Burrow wishes to recuperate as wholehearted. He argues against critics (John Leyerle, Andy Orchard) who see the apposition between Beowulf and Heremod as gloomily proleptic, or who read Wiglaf’s later speeches as a critique of Beowulf’s rashness. Burrow’s reading may help to modify some more extreme accounts of Beowulf as an indictment of revenge culture, but much remains debatable. I’m skeptical, for instance, of his claim that the scop’s account of the Finn episode eventually “redounds to the glory of Denmark” (45) and so is neutralized as a monitory narrative for audiences within and outside the text. Here more space would be needed to investigate ways in which voice, audience, and temporal apposition work to complicate, and frequently darken, the tone of the poem. This chapter briefly notes Ruth Finnegan’s influential work on African oral poetry and makes reference to Norse traditions, but more discussion of the varying sources and listening situations of praise poetry in Anglo-Saxon England would have been useful. Indeed, one of the most ambivalent instances of praise poetry in Norse narrative is sited in Viking York—the moment in Egils saga where Egil Skallagrimsson composes overnight a drápa in honor of his enemy Erik Bloodaxe in order to save his own head.

Chapter 3 discusses a variety of Middle English poems. Following Gregory Nagy, Burrow distinguishes between “historical” praise of the deeds of heroes and “here-and-now” praise, as, for example, of the Virgin Mary or the “Annot” of a Harley lyric. Burrow himself calls these sections “sketchy” (61), and there is rarely time to explore...