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Reviews The Fiction of the Idea JOSEPH A. DANE Jesse M. Gellrich. The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages: lAnguage Theory, Mythology, and Fiction Cornell University Press 1985· 292. $27·50 This book has much to recommend it. It is generally clear and well written, and what it attempts has not, I think, been done before. Few medievalists have adjusted their language to post-structuralist fashions, and Gellrich honestly tries to do so. In the past thirty years, we have learned to 'read' Chaucer the way we were trained to read, say, Donne, but we have yet to read him the way we routinely read, say, Nietzsche, Proust, and Rousseau. Gellrich shows that we can say the same thing about Dante, Chaucer, and medieval theories ofart, language, and anything else that our critical colleagues say about whatever and whomever they claim to study. In his opening sentence, Gellrich claims to be carrying on the work of Huizinga, Auerbach, Curtius, Singleton, and Robertson.This is notquite true, since Gellrich is far more sensitive to critical fashions than any of these. His book is divided into two parts. The first consists of three chapters: one on the Book, another on 'The Semiology of Space' (actually, on architecture and music); a third on 'mythology' (actually on Language theory; chapter 1, on the Book, is about myth). The second has what Gellrich himself calls 'close readings' (p '7) of Dante and selected works and passages of Chaucer. His investigations show, not surprisingly, that the works of Dante and Chaucer are 'allegories of reading,' and along the way, we hear talkofDerrida and de Man. I would like to hearmore, but in all fairness, some readers might be happy with less. This is not an easy book to understand. Chapter 1 is entitled 'The Argument of the Book: and it has nothing to do with real books or real manuscripts. There are :arefully footnoted references to Eastern religion, to translations of Dum~zil, Eliade, and Uyi-Strauss, but no documentation for sentences such as 'Yet while iUch denunciations must have sounded from the pulpits of the middle ages, the ~opulace was charmed by an irresistible fascination with the images created by loldsmith, sculptor, and painter' (p 44; see also p '9 on pulpits) or ' that this shift .vas well under way in nominalism and the development of empirical methods in UNIVERSIlY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME 56, NUMBER 2, WINTER lC)86/ 7 366 JOSEPH A. DANE physical science needs no affirmation' (p 50). Chapter 2 has a more ambitious title: 'The Semiology of Space in the Middle Ages: On Manuscript Painting, Sacred Architecture, Scholasticism, and Music.' There may wellbe valuable insights here, but few of them are the author's. For a book that is going to argue that medieval fiction challenges authority, I find it extremely annoying that the author's comments on architecture should consist of page after page ofuncritical summary of Gombrich, Panofsky (thus the connection with scholasticism, you see), and von Simson, e.g.: 'The Gothic cathedral stood for [some medieval writers], according to Otto von Simson, as the outstanding example of what could be done with number and proportion' (pp 74-5). I guess you can't be too safe in this business. As for the'oneness' of a medieval cathedral, that is explained on the same page with a long quotation from Giedion (whom I have never read) on 'Egyptian megalithic structures.' I find nothing in this seclion that cannot be found in the sources Gellrich scrupulously dtes. Icannot judge the following section on music, since I would have to read the unpublished dissertation cited as a major source to know whether Gellrich or his I auctor' has collected his numerous citations. Whoever did deserves some praise. In the following chapter, on medieval language theory, Gellrich again dutifully and scrupulously cites the obvious (but not most recent) authorities. But he is too polite to challenge or test their views with a single citation or reading of a primary source other than the treatise of Thomas of Erfurt, in the notOriously erratic translation of Bursill-Hall. I wish Gellrich and his editors had taken the same respectful attitude towards...

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