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STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER surely be to perpetuate the traditional notion of humanism as a cultural movement that floats above the immediate constraints of historical place and time; it would have been useful, for example, to consider the contribu­ tion of Petrarch and his fellow humanists to the formation of the first absolutist state in modern Europe under the Milanese Visconti. This volume offers excellent scholarship, generous documentation, and most helpful bibliographical resources. It is worth reading not only for the expert knowledge that the contributors bring to us but also for those instructive moments of doubt, stress, or rebellion they experience in working within the assigned categories that shape and bridle their thinking. DAVID WALLACE University of Texas at Austin ROBERT FRANCIS COOK. The Sense ofThe Song ofRoland. Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1987. Pp. xix, 266. $34.50. The Song ofRoland, like Beowulf, Sir Gawain andthe Green Knight, and The Wife ofBath's Prologue and Tale, occupies a curious place in modern medievalstudies. It is the best-known example of itsgenre, the subject of a greater amount of scholarly commentary than all the other chansons de geste combined; indeed, it is often treated as if it so perfectly exemplifies the genre that no other works need to be considered in a discussion of the heroic ethos ofthe French Middle Ages. As a result, however, it has become an indispensablepart of survey courses intranslation, taught to unsuspect­ ing undergraduates by people who are not specialists in the field, who do notknow thescholarship, and who may even be unable to read the poem in the original language. In such circumstances, teachers tend to rely on received opinion concern­ ing a work's central concerns and interpretative cruces; Roland is too short to make a decent-sized paperback, so translators are quite willing to provide introductions embodying such opinions, developed from the work of generations ofspecialists. The result is that, as Bernard Cerquiglini has pointed out, most studies ofRoland say much the same thing; the difficulty with the common consensus, as Robert Cook argues ably and convincingly, is that it is wrong. 202 REVIEWS For teachers of the poem, the most important section of this book is the Commentary on the Narrative (pp. 3-124). Cook proceeds through the poem stanza by stanza, discussing both the text and previous critical pronouncements about its meaning. This procedure quickly reveals (1) that certain stanzas have been privileged by earlier critics not because of their importance to the narrative but because of their utility in defending preconceived notions about the poem's essence; (2) that other stanzas have been ignored and that they undermine or contradict such preconceived notions; and (3) that once such notions have been abandoned, the poem and its characters make more sense, more coherently and more in accord with what we know of the poet's world, than received opinion about the work would allow. In the process Cook makes it clear that we will have to abandon many of the commonplaces around which we have organized classes onRoland. The First HornSceneceasesto be a depiction of erroneouschoice,or even choice at all, when we realize that Roland's decision here has been determined hundreds of lines earlier when he accepted his position as commander of the rear guard. Roland's "pride" vanishes when we pay proper attention to the contrasts between his vows for the future and those of the pagans; they boast that they will succeed, and they fail, but he says only that he will carry out his duty, and he does. A further proof that he is humble, and not proud, comes in his death scene: would a twelfth-century poet show a man guilty of such a mortal sin being accepted into heaven by Gabriel and Michael? It becomes difficult to speak of "tragedy" here-tempting as it might be for teachers whose syllabus stretches back to Sophocles-if we think for even a moment about the Christian context of the poem. Readers of translations will find plenty of evidence for disagreeing with Cook. In the Second Horn Scene, for example, does not Oliver himself say that Roland's earlier refusal...

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