Jack Upland, Friar Daw’s Reply, and Upland’s Rejoinder ed. by P.L. Heyworth, and: A Glastonbury Miscellany of the Fifteenth Century ed. by A.G. Rigg (review)

HUMANITIES 377 as one asking dispensation from any attachment to his order, but it is really a statement, not a request. And from beginning to end it strikes a false note: it is ungenerous and vain, at its best plaintive and petulant, at its worst rudely offensive. There were surely many good reasons for Erasmus's seeking dispensation from his order; but if it is the right thing he asks for, he asks it for the wrong reasons, and the case he proffers is a little less than honest. But the letter is well known and needs little comment at this time. Erasmus had asked a dispensation for quite another situation some six years before. And, however well or ill Julius used the !power of the keys,' he did this one favour for Erasmus in granting what he asked graciously enough. During his stay in England in 1506 Erasmus had considered the possibility of settling there and being appointed to some benefice in that country. His illegitimacy was an impediment unless Rome could lift the ban. The required permission came from Julius (Ep 187A) in good time, but it was only in 1512 that the living at Aldington was offered him and only for a short time that he availed himself of it in any true sense. (The headnote to Julius's letter tells of later offers of ecclesiastical positions but they do not concern this volume.) If it is unfortunate that the letter to Servatius is the last significant letter in the book (for no other epistle shows Erasmus so unbecomingly querulous), still it is fitting to bring the volume to an end with a letter so important in the career of this great man. Henceforth Erasmus was to belong to the world, a world in no way unattached from the things of God as Erasmus viewed it but providing a new freedom for his gifts. Professor John H. Munro, of the Department of Economics at the University of Toronto, has again provided a valuable addendum: a thirty-five page essay on the 'purchasing power of coins and of wages in England and the Low Countries from 1500 to 1514,' including careful tabulations. And the University of Toronto Press has once more produced a splendid book, beautiful to behold, easy to read, well illustrated, and opening gracefully and easily. A book to remember. (SISTER GERALDINE THOMPSON) P.L. Heyworth, editor, Jack Upland, Friar Daw's Reply, and Upland's Rejoinder. London and Toronto: Oxford University Press 1968, 188, $7.50; A.G. Rigg, editor, A Glastonbury Miscellany of the Fifteenth Century. London and Toronto: Oxford University Press 1968, 170, $6.50 An awkward literary period to deal with, the fifteenth century is an age of transition, a valley between the mountains of the fourteenth-century achievement and the Renaissance. On the whole its names are the second rank: Lydgate, Henryson, Hoccleve. We speak of the Scottish or English 378 LETTERS IN CANADA 'Chaucerians,' showing our awareness that they draw their strength from the earlier master; or of the continuators of the Piers Plowman tradition, writers sharing some of Langland's ideas and ideals, but little of his genius; or of Friihhumanismus and 'pre-Renaissance' writers. Both Rigg and Heyworth feel the difficulty of the period. Heyworth is almost defiant about his texts: 'They have earned their neglect. If I tidy them away to an honest grave it is not with any claim to U definitiveness," but because there is no good reason why they should ever be disinterred again.' The works presented in such funereal fashion indeed have little literary interest, and even their historical interest is modest. They form a small part of the phenomenon of Lollardy, which 'ceased to be a serious reform movement quite early in the fifteenth century because of its loss of "intellectual respectability.'" Why then, one might reasonably ask, reedit the texts? Although apparently only two copies of the (1536?) blackletter edition of Jack Upland survive, it is in Speght's 1602 Chaucer and the 1687 reprint, in Urry's 1721 Chaucer, and in Skeat's 1897 Chaucerian and Other Pieces. The Reply and Rejoinder are in Wright's Political Poems and Songs...