In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Truth and Tales: Cultural Mobility and Medieval Mediaed. by Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson
  • Matthew C. Brown
T ruth andT ales: C ulturalM obility andM edievalM edia. Edited by Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv + 294. $69.95 (hardcover); $27.95 (paper); $14.95 (CD).

This collection of essays is a Festschriftfor Richard Firth Green, a scholar whose work will need no introduction for those familiar with Middle English literary studies. Dr. Green's indispensable contributions include his books Poets and Princepleasers(1980) and A Crisis of Truth(1999), as well as a raft of often-cited articles and book chapters on topics such as the relationship between law and literature, the romance [End Page 121]and ballad traditions, and Chaucer. Truth and Talesis remarkably timely because its editors have organized it around themes drawn from Green's work that now seem quite prescient. Recent events (e.g., Brexit and the 2016 U.S. presidential election) have drawn attention to yawning divides between elite and lay audiences in our own media culture, issuing in ferocious disagreements about the status of truth itself. Medievalists doubting the public relevance of their discipline within our overheated media environment (what the editors call "hypermediation," p. 6) will find renewed purpose here. Each chapter explores in a different way the role of oral and textual media in bridging and exacerbating cultural difference; together, they emphasize that medieval modes of transmission were not less complex or credulous than our own. The collection is bookended by a pair of stimulatingly presentist pieces (Green's and Taylor's) that draw our attention to the possible filiations between medieval and modern "crises of truth."

Part 1, Green's own contribution, is a wryly brilliant juxtaposition of modern urban legends (or perhaps "fake news") with medieval tales, such as "The Vanishing Leper," that try to self-authenticate as textual forms of orally shared "friend-of-a-friend" ("FOAF," p.22) stories. Under Green's eye, patterns of medieval skepticism emerge that challenge the assumption that medieval audiences were less anxious about the authentication of moral stories than modern ones (p. 24). Several essays in Parts 2 and 3 continue to question received notions of historical rupture in the way that oral and textual traditions transmit truth; we might prefer to speak of an "oral-textual" tradition here in light of a repeated insistence on the interdependence of the two modes. Thomas Hahn's essay, "Don't Cry for Me, Augustinus: Dido and the Dangers of Empathy," evokes the ways in which Chaucer's rewriting of Dido in the vernacular was simultaneously dependent on tradition and a "wildly experimental" rupture with it (p. 51). By exploring ways of evoking feeling for its own sake, the House of Famenarrator's response to Dido "constructs a model of masculinity whose emotional scripts trouble heteronormativity" (p. 58). Hahn suggests an intriguing parallel with Julian of Norwich, who also explores the affective potential of a self-conscious position of subjective "suspension" in the vernacular. Turning to Piers Plowman, Stephen Yeager's "The New Plow and the Old" excavates an often overlooked sense of the word "plough" (referring to an archaic unit of "plowland") in order to show how nostalgia for an older, Anglo-Saxon "homiletic" style of legal discourse informs the character of Piers Plowman himself. Yeager gives us a Piers more interested in administrative than spiritual practice and who embodies the paradox of a written appeal to oral traditions as a defense against corrupting bureaucratic innovation. Jane Toswell's "Exegesis of Tears in Lambeth Homily 17" similarly explores the persistence of Anglo-Saxon oral-textual discourse into the Middle English period, arguing that our usual language of continuity and rupture doesn't quite work here: the homily group is a "wholly new" translation and reworking in Early Middle English of not-so-new compositions that are organized like Anglo-Saxon sermons (p. 94). Barbara Hanawalt's essay, "Toward the Common Good: Punishing Fraud among the Victualers of Medieval London," examines the highly emotive phraseology of written ordinances concerning fraud in...

pdf

Share