Literary Nominalism and the Theory of Rereading Late Medieval Texts: A New Research Paradigm ed. by Richard J. Utz (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER want their books read, and their university libraries to continue to ac­ quire books, then they must resist the cachet ofa label in favor ofmore colleague-friendly presses. LEE PATTERSON Yale University RICHARD J. UTZ, ed. Literary Nominalism and the Theory ofRereading Late Medieval Texts: A New Research Paradigm. Medieval Studies, vol. 5. Lewiston, N.Y., and Queenston, Ontario: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995. Pp. 256. $90.00. This volume is a collection of essays dealing with what the editor, Richard J. Utz, derivatively calls "a paradigm shift," after the phrase made famous, if not bromidic, by the contemporary philosopher Thomas S. Kuhn. As recent scholarship of the late medieval period has moved nominalism from the margins to the center ofphilosophical and theological attention, so literary criticism-in quasi-vassalage-has come to reexamine the literature ofthe period according to the dictates of the new paradigm. Although Chaucer has been the focus of most of these nominalist reconsiderations--even in this volume seven ofthe ten essays focus on Chaucerian themes-Professor Utz has editorially ex­ tended the paradigm to include three extra-Chaucerian essays: Jay Ruud's on Julian of Norwich's Revelations ofDivine Love, which argues for a correspondence of concerns therein between mysticism and nomi­ nalism; Michael Randall's onJean Molinet's Chappellet des Dames, which places the poem in a shifting fifteenth-century "episteme" from the realist/analogical to the nominalist/anti-analogical; and J. Stephen Russell's on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, of which more anon. In his own lead-offessay, Utz is extremely helpful to readers who are still trying to "negotiate" the shift, not only by bibliographically sur­ veying its movers and shakers but also by cueing the uninitiated into understanding some of its presuppositions: that, for example, Augustinianism and Thomism had by Chaucer's time given way to nominalism as the philosophical or theological underpinning of liter­ ary texts. Despite the paucity ofreferences to specific nominalists in the literature of the time, Utz argues that since fourteenth-century 328 REVIEWS thinkers-like the Dominican Robert Holcot-"attempted to spread nominalist thought in a more popular mode among 'lewed' non­ specialists" (p. 14), they could not but have influenced the literati as well. Even Chaucer's friend Ralph Strode, who since Israel Gollancz's well-known 1898 DNB article had been considered a Thomist, finds himselfconscripted into the nominalist camp here and therefore serves as a convenientpoint d'appui for nominalist readings ofChaucer's works. Utz's arguments for Strode's nominalism are, by his own admission, not incontrovertible, but compelling nonetheless. Compelling too is his reading of the narrator's leap to faith in the Epilogue of Troilus and Criseyde, not merely as another illustration of the contemptus mundi tra­ dition but as a narrative strategy that "resembles the academic fideism of {Chaucer's} coeval nominalist counterparts" (p. 19). Notwithstanding his own preference for nominalist readings, Utz has sought to recruit a few recalcitrant voices in his symposium. Edgar Laird, for example, takes issue with those who would write off The Knight's Tale as a kind of Boethianism manque by placing it in the tra­ dition ofuniversals signified by the "scientific ontology" ofAlbumasar, Grosseteste, and Wyclif. He thus supports Peggy Knapp's idea that The Canterbury Tales moves from the intelligible world of The Knight's Tale to the world ofsensibles in The Miller's Tale. AndJohn Micheal Crafton argues that by being drawn to both sides of the nominalist controversy, Chaucer consumes both his Augustinian and nominalist precursors. Having confronted realist themes in The Book of the Duchess, he aban­ dons allegory for nominalism in the other dream visions, but is finally disillusioned by it. Troilus and Criseyde continues the dialectic and The Canterbury Tales perfects it. Grover Furr enters the lists by considering the problem offuture con­ tingents-considered by many the dominant nominalist theme of Ricardian literature-in his article on The Nun's Priest's Tale. Although the Nun's Priest seems to be agreeing with Chauntecleer that what "God forwoot moost needes bee," Furr contends that the subsequent al­ lusion to the great philosophical dispute over simple or conditional ne...