The Mirroure of the Worlde: A Middle English Translation of Le Miroir du Monde (review)

Reviews 209 Parergon 21.1 (2004) Raymo, Robert R., Elaine E. Whitaker and Ruth E. Sternglantz, eds, The Mirroure of the Worlde: A Middle English Translation of Le Miroir du Monde (Medieval Academy of America), Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 2003; hardback; pp. x, 644; RRP US$85; ISBN 0802036139. This is a welcome critical edition of a once highly popular work, and medievalists will be grateful to have this thorough edition of the fifteenth-century MS Bodley 283 available for the first time. The Mirroure is an amalgamation of Le Miroir du Monde and the Somme le Roi, French manuals of moral instruction for the laity, which were themselves inspired by William Peraldus’s Summa de vitiis (1236) and Summa de virtutibus (1248). The Mirroure draws on both the French manuals for its style; it has some of the structural clarity of the Somme, but also incorporates the diffusive and allusive rhetoric of the Miroir. The Mirroure happily employs French words, not always previously recorded in English; and will delight linguists with its frequent neologisms. The Mirroure also employs Latin, although most is translated. It is reasonable to conclude that the compiler assumed at least a smattering of Latin knowledge. The edition includes textual and explanatory notes, a glossary, extensive bibliography and, usefully, an index of names. This sprawling text, over 13,000 lines, will provide a useful resource for comparison with other works on the vices and virtues, and will help further understanding of lay Christianity at that time. The vices and virtues treatise is in many ways conventional and traditional, but there is a growing interest in how these treatises reflect an understanding of human psychology and motivation . The Mirroure’s explanation of terms such as prudence, wisdom and konnyng provides further context for analysis of these terms in the philosophical and spiritual writings of the period. The Mirroure also has several chapters on friendship and justice; the social and cultural manifestations of the ‘good life’. Interestingly, the chapter on prayer seems to advocate devout and inward prayer at church and at the feasts, but does not emphasise daily and internal prayer as much as some other texts. Nevertheless, The Mirroure is grounded absolutely in the Ten Commandments, the Articles of Faith and the Lord’s Prayer, all of which are explicated. The Christianity, then, is orthodox in the sense that it advocates a growing awareness of the inner self based on the auctoritas of the Church’s interpretation of Scripture. The constant interspersing of ‘real’ stories to illustrate the doctrinal and moral point provides a further example of the medieval habit of juxtaposing the divine 210 Reviews Parergon 21.1 (2004) and human, the spiritual and literal. The physicality of the imagery and the constant exhortation to inner development seem to ground the theology in the human, but believes in the possibility of the deification of the human. Although the vices are possibly the more interesting section to some readers, it is instructive to note that they form a slightly shorter section than that on the virtues. Medieval sensibilities do not always conform to modern tastes. The Mirroure employs several images of trees as the root of evil and of love and salvation. There is a clear recapitulation of the tree in the Garden of Eden and of the Cross itself. This multivalent symbolism becomes almost second nature in medieval theology, and raises questions about how widespread symbolic understanding was amongst the laity. The tree with its various branches is also, of course, a very useful mnemonic device by which to keep such diffuse material in the memory. A brief trawl through this immense work immediately brings to mind contemporary works, and a comparison between them provokes much thought. The Mirroure includes chapters on clergy, on Wit, on the bataille that Goddis knyghtes hatthe ayens theire hertis. Although Langland’s debt to such treatises is known, reading The Mirroure stimulates the thought why his work is so different; why his first person narrator is more engaging, and what is the influence of a religious understanding of figura, tropes and symbolism on what is more usually defined as literature. Chaucer’s Parson’s Tale, indebted to Peraldus...