Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England ed. Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway (review)

This collection of thirteen essays derives from a conference on ‘Form after Historicism’, that was organised in honour of Professor Anne Middleton who is known for her work tackling the issues of literary criticism intertwined with interacting traditions and linguistic spheres.

The essays focus on ‘reanimated ways’ of approaching aesthetics. A new trend is emerging in which what have previously been taken for granted as ‘distinctly literary forms’ have been called into question, demanding a major reorientation of some of the familiar approaches (such as historicism, theory, and gender studies). However, until recently, scholars engaging with this new critical shift have not shown any interest in the forms of the literature of the Middle Ages. This collection provides a remedy to that omission.

The essays are divided thematically into two broad categories – ‘The Literary between Latin and Vernacular’ and ‘Literarity in the Vernacular Sphere’ – a division that mirrors the two basic medieval literary situations on which the volume is based. In general, the first category’s essays take as their starting point the fundamental relationship between Latin and vernacular literary texts, from which they trace a broad amalgam of forms and conditions of the medieval literary. The essays of the second section describe literary developments outside of the Latin sphere, especially, the relationships between English, Italian, and French, following the assumption that these languages shaped medieval forms and ideas of literary genre and ‘literariness’. Throughout the collection as a whole, the late fourteenth-century poetry of Chaucer, Langland, and Gower feature heavily.

A number of essays are particularly worth noticing. Rita Copeland’s contribution looks at school definitions and guides for ‘literature’, to arrive at a fresh definition of the ‘contact zone’ between learned, clerical culture, and vernacular English poetry. Through the Western canonical vision of ‘the literary’, Copeland is able to reconstruct the ‘picture of the role of the Ars poetica in the medieval classroom’ (p. 26). Wendy Scase’s essay proceeds from a similar assumption. However, she exceeds the ‘classroom’ environment and ventures into describing ‘a vernacular citational style’ applied by Langland’s followers: ‘The Piers-tradition poets also use grammar-school texts as a point of reference, explicitly acknowledging or drawing on school texts’ (p. 38). In his contribution, Lee Paterson looks at Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde to redefine the concept of ‘tragedy’. Paterson refutes the poem’s supposed Boethian origin and assigns the influence for the Chaucerian tragedy to Dante: ‘Chaucer could have derived this non-Boethian and much more capacious understanding of tragedy from many sources, but he almost certainly learned it from Dante’ (p. 248).

To conclude, this is a valuable book for those wishing to decipher the intricacies of aesthetics in the medieval literature. The collection offers to them vital critical and historical reference points from which to answer questions that currently preoccupy literary studies.