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174 Reviews opposed to Theorique in Fragments I and II and Rhetorique in Fragments III, TV and V). The tales serve both to advance the soul journey and to respond to 'Dantean lunarity'. The themes of avarice and pride suggest a comparison between the Parson and the Pardoner and thus of the Fragments themselves. The Parson's Tale is recognised as a corrective to the Pardoner's, the former pointing to pride as the original sin and as the origin of the latter's cupiditas. Humtiity, a virtue which is likened in various aspects to the moon, is proposed as a remedy, the Parson's lunarity the antitype of the Physician's and the Pardoner's pride. Placed at the end of Chaucer's twofold pilgrimage, the Parson's Tale not only responds to all the preceding tales, but i t also works to undermine the particular hierarchy of sciences advanced by Gower in the Confessio; in the end, it is moral theology and not any type of practical philosophy that asserts itseti as the primary, supreme science. Astell's thesis is original, informative and stimulating. Whtie I feel that more consideration of other surviving manuscripts and their various arrangements could have been made, Chaucer and the Universe of Learning offers an alternative approach to reading the Canterbury Tales as a work without any fixed order and, in so doing, reveals Chaucer as a learned and philosophical poet closely in touch with literary trends of his period. Caroline E. Thompson Department of English University of Western Australia Bawcutt, Prisctila, ed., William Dunbar Selected Poems (Longman Annotated Texts), London and N e w York, Longman, 1996; paper; pp. xii, 451 ; R.R.P. £19.99. (Distributed in Australia by Penguin Books Australia Ltd.) William Dunbar Selected Poems, presenting fresh editions of seventy works by one of the finest of the late medieval Scots 'makars', belongs to the Longman Annotated Texts series designed to provide 'the key teaching editions'. In this teaching category, Bawcutt's is only the second edition of Dunbar since Mackay Mackenzie's of sixty years Reviews 175 ago, James Kinsley's 1958 selections being the other. To be sure, Kinsley's complete edition of 1981 was a vast improvement—in choice of copy-text, record of variants, accurate transcription, notes, glossary—on the nineteenth-century Scottish Text Society edition but, with its prohibitive price and size, the volume could not be a student edition. (Kinsley acknowledged this, calling it 'a scholars' edition'.) Nonetheless, Bawcutt invites comparison with it, foreshadowing that her choice of copy-text 'differs from that of Kinsley in several cases' and that she values the Asloan and Maitland Manuscripts 'more highly than he [Kinsley] does'. (Notably, in five cases Bawcutt's preference for Maitland Folio copy-texts indeed produces significantly different texts.) Does Bawcutt's edition also futiti its commitment to the student? Assistance begins within the preliminaries, in a brief Chronology of Dunbar's life, interspersed with equally brief aUusions to important contemporary events. Some of these, such as '1506 Rebellion in Highlands crushed', also refer the student to a specific poem. (Here, for example, there is '(See 22)', which is 'In vice most vicius', on the highlander Donald Owre.) In the ensuing Note on Editorial Procedure, Bawcutt alludes to the particular difficulties of Dunbar's poems—chronology and poem title—and states her solution: a departure from previous arrangements (by poem type or subject) in favour of an alphabetical ordering by first line, with an Index of Familiar Titles at the back to guide the reader accustomed to these. The Inhoduction, covering critical approach; life and milieu; Uterary inheritance; stytistic, metrical, generic and other aspects of Dunbar's artistry; manuscripts and prints on which the edition is based; language; orthography; grammar; vocabulary, and a gloss of common words, is m a d e more valuable by the inclusion of short references to relevant sources, given in full in the extensive Bibliography at the back. Should a student wish to look beyond the flowering of Scots vernacular poetry under James IV to that of the fifteenth century as a whole, for instance, he or she is guided to three recent (sometimes differing) critical discussions...

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