For Her Good Estate: the Life of Elizabeth de Burgh (review)

Reviews 241 to bridge the national traditions of literary study. For U S readers, her foregrounding of her subject position, as female and Australian, has created an instant sense of familiarity and an identification with an almost postcolonial critical suspicion. Her ability to engage the politics of British academic life also reminds us that for generations Australian and N e w Zealand scholars have populated a remarkable number of Oxbridge posts in medieval literature. Trigg is often able to address her various national constituencies simultaneously, but at other times she purposely triangulates them, dramatising the limits of our sense ofa shared culture. Trigg's thesis also helps explain twofrustratingpuzzles she does not directly address. One is why the energies of recent scholarship of Middle English literature have been generated more by Langland studies and by studies of Middle English prose rather than by Chaucer studies. The other is the relative irrelevance of even the most sophisticated Chaucer criticism to scholars of other fields. I have emphasized the contemporary polemical aspects of this important book, but its many local contributions to scholarship should not go unnoticed. Trigg convincingly overturns our efforts to locate an anxiety of influence among fifteenth-century Chaucerian poets. She brilliantly traces the transformation of Chaucer from 'auctor' to 'author' in the Early M o d e m period. Her thesis about Chaucerian congeniality informs such disparate topics as the priority of Chaucer's manuscripts, especially the jousts between the champions of Hengwrt and Ellesmere. This book will be required reading for Chaucer scholars and students, but it is also potentially relevant to decision makers in the publishing Mid education sectors. John M. Ganim Department of English University of California, Riverside Underbill, Frances A., For Her Good Estate: the Life of Elizabeth de Burgh (The N e w Middle Ages 12), London, Macmillan, 1999; cloth; pp. ix, 221; RRP US$40; ISBN 0333753259. Writing histories of individual medieval women is a difficult task, given the usual poor survival of material. W h e n a comprehensive collection of sources does survive, it deserves detailed examination and this is what Frances Underhill has done with her history of Elizabeth de Burgh. The survival of Elizabeth's 242 Reviews account books provides a unique and valuable record from which to explore her life and times. Although these accounts give less information on Elizabeth's personal life and inner piety than would be ideal, they remain valuable for the light they cast on Elizabeth's business and family relationships. The account books are well known to scholars, but the monograph length discussion by Underhill allows for detailed contextualisation of the material and of Elizabeth de Burgh's life. The book is divided into six chapters, with thefirstand longest giving a comprehensive chronological narrative of Elizabeth de Burgh's life. The following chapters look at different aspects of her life based primarily on her surviving account books. Thefirstof these thematic chapters is concerned with the management of her estates, the next chapter details her personal relationships with others, including family and friends. Then there are chapters on politics and patronage, piety and a final concluding chapter which draws the many threads back together. This is a sensible and readable organisation of the material, giving adequate background contextualisation for the detailed evidence from the account books and legal cases. One of the main strengths of this book is the concrete and sustained examination of many legal, financial and administrative aspects of aristocratic women's lives. This allows Underhill to explore many otherwise obscure and difficult legal concepts, particularly about land acquisition, management and alienation, in more depth than is often the case. Other important aspects of women's lives such as jointure, dower, and the complexities of marriage as a king's ward are all analysed in detail as they applied to Elizabeth de Burgh. Underhill also gives a useful reading of the politics of the time, from the end of Edward II's reign, to the accession and then the minority of Edward III. Again this is all from the perspective of the fortunes of Elizabeth de Burgh, giving an individual focus for the well-known political narrative. This book would be...