Gregory the Great: perfection in imperfection (review)

258 Short notices Straw, Carole, Gregory the Great: perfection in imperfection, rpt Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, University of California Press, 1991: paper, pp. xiv, 295; 4 figures; R.R.P. US$13.95. Considering the crucial role played by Gregory the Great in the thought of the Middle Ages, it is astonishing how underdeveloped work on him was until recently. The last few decades have seen a major improvement in the situation: although, the bulk of the best work has been in French. Scholars writing in English having produced monographs which are partial or which fail for one reason or another to carry conviction. The work of Carole Straw has completely changed matters. Here is an author who is alive to Gregory's strengths, genuinely at home across the whole range of his works, alerttothe implications of other modem work, and capable of drawing c it major themes. The figure who emerges from her study is depressing in his general orientation. From the excellent index one learns that he had more to say about adversity, carnality, death and fear than their respective opposites: prosperity, spirituality, life and hope. One is also struck by the static nature of his thought. Unlike Augustine, who found himself continually challenged to move on inteUectually, Gregory seems to have felt no need to revise or refine his thought. Straw also brings out well the extent to which categories overlap in Gregory's thought. There is an extent to which his hazy, sub-Platonist bluning of intellectual categories is reflected in the imprecision of his literary style. Straw's study does not suffer from this defect. I found myself warming to her authorial tone, always precise and clear. This is a superb book which I cannot praise too highly. John Moorhead Department of History University of Queensland Wright, George T., Shakespeare's metrical art, rpt, Berkeley and Los Angeles, university of California Press, 1991, paper, pp. xvi; 349; R.R.P. US$13.95. This study of iambic pentameter in Shakespeare's plays appeared in 1988. Itfilleda gap which surprisingly still existed in Shakespeare studies. Dorothy Sipe's Shakespeare's metrics (1969), often cited in bibUographies, was concerned only with metrical uses of variant forma of a word. Wright's book is impressive and engaging. Eight chapters devoted to Shakespeare's departures and variations from the standard iambic pentameter, and to the play of phrase and line form the centre of the book. They are framed by a consideration of iambic pentameter in poets from Chaucer to Milton, including incidentally a new way to read the ...