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Reviews 163 awaits reproduction. Looking again at the originals, I realise that the iconographical and verbal discourses demand to be read together and I am sure that Henry, who has also produced a facsimile edition of The mirour of mans saluacioun (Scolar, 1986), would readdy agree. It is scarcely appropriate, though, to be demanding more even before there has been a chance for Henry's text to be assimilated. A n indispensable introduction to it is her account of the structure and argument of the four parts of The pilgrimage in Neuphilologische Mitteilungen, 87 (1986), 128-41 and 22936 . I wonder, though, whether this sometimes alarmingly labde allegory merits the ancdlary status Henry awards it when she claims that 'it is a perfect introduction to doctrines underlying the very different poetic complexities of better known works such as the Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman' (p. 236). Here, for instance, is Old Age speaking to thetext'sT at the end of Part Four: T a m pilke Ttat when pou were bore with Jeonenesse, pou wendest neuere haue seyn. pou seidest of me: 'She is ferre; she shal not come a good whde ...' (Unes 7105-7) Middle English youthe is not an adequate equivalent for 'jeonenesse', though some of the copiers have problems with the French word (see p. 352). She means all of Ufe up to Elde. The narrator, however, resists her re-reading of his past, wanting her to remain an icon: 'Sey me', quod I, 'of pe potentes [crutches], and panne anon go hens ... m e tiketh nought pi presence.' 'Like or nouht like', quod she, 'so shat it not be. Deth shalfirstcome to pee er I departefropee.' (Unes 7130-4) Surely this is not 'doctrine' but a reaUzation of what it means to live life by way of the structuring signs one's culture allows. Any one sign, Elde supporting herself on crutches, brings every other sign into play, until the end of life brings the end of signification. The Pilgrimage of the lyfe of the manhode has its own poetic complexity and, now that there is a text for our time, the readings can, in their own turn, arise. Mary Dove Department of EngUsh University of Melbourne Krier, Theresa M., Gazing on secret sights: Spenser, classical imitation, and the decorums of vision, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1990; cloth; pp. xii, 257; R. R. P. US$31.50. Before the publication of Kent Hieatt's Short time's endless monument in 1960 and of A. C. Hamdton's The structure of the allegory in 'The Faerie Queene' in 1961, Spenser studies had slumbered undisturbed in the shadow cast by the 164 Reviews Variorum edition of 1932, characterised by the steady accumulation of source material of ever increasing remoteness and decreasing applicability, coupled paradoxically with an essentially unrelated, Romantic and formalist response to the text of Spenser's great poem. By arguing and, to the chagrin of many readers, essentially vahdating by objective criteria Spenser's employment of an elaborate and personal number system, Hieatt helped to remove Spenser's work from the area of subjective response and to place it in the public arena of positivist verifiability. Hamilton, by clewing The Faerie Queene to the literary criteria of its o w n day, and especially to the views of Sir Philip Sidney, demonstrated that any culturally verifiable reading of Spenser's allegory must start with a very close scrutiny of the rhetorical devices of the poem's literary meaning before venturing with profit into the field of Elizabethan public iconography. Other scholars foUowed, and the 1960s and '70s can now be seen as a period of great Spenser scholarship, scholarship which has simultaneously been of inestimable value to specialists in adjoining areas of Renaissance thought and letters. Those times seem now past. A new formalism is afoot in the land. Krier's book is devoted, in the context of Spenser's poetry, to the Uterary, physiological, and psychological mechanics of the ways in which human beings observe one another and to the ways in which individuals respond to the act of being observed. More pungendy, The Faerie Queene is extensively analysed in terms of 'the culturally rich...

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