Medieval English religious and ethical literature: Essays in honour of G.H. Russell (review)

132 Reviews other reading. There are 68 reference-notes in the book. Thirteen of these are to Koenigsberger's 1500-1789 volume in this series and the rest are a curious assemblage, principally of source materid in collections of readings and general secondary books. There is no way in which the reader could become systematicdly better informed about m o d e m specidist scholarship from these references and no other bibliographicd gddance is given. The 23 maps supplied are dso disappointing. To judge by the list of acknowledgements, they were not drawn specificdly for this book. N o care for consistency is evident The reader who compares maps 3.1 (p.153) and 3.2 (p.156), both purporting to show France in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, will be surprised and confused to see that entirely different intemd divisions of France are shown. Other maps such as 2.1, showing, without chronologicd gddance, the spread of Christianity, attempt too much inadequate cartography. The photographs are reasonably well reproduced on the art paper which makes the paperback so unexpectedly heavy, but the captions are careless (e.g. 3.3, p.154, where the reading of the Bayeaux Tapestry gives 'Gyr' for Gyr6\ a significant piece of evidence for the English manufacture of the embroidery of which a point is made in the text on p. 153). It is dso distressing to see the cross-page from the Lindisfarne Gospels upside-down on p. 132. This is not the single-volume history of medievd Europe for which there is certainly a market R. Ian Jack Department of History University of Sydney Kratzmann, G. and J. Simpson, eds, Medieval English religious and ethical literature: Essays in honour ofG.H. Russell, Woodbridge, Boydell and Brewer, 1986; pp.vi, 250; R.R.P. £27.50. 'Why', asks Stephanie Trigg at the end of her contribution to this anthology, a critique of Israel Gollancz's edition of Wynnere and Wastoure, 'do we still vdue literary history over literary interpretation?'. If it is the case that medievd English Uterature specidists still do vdue literary 'interpretation' less highly than literary 'history', the answer to Stephanie Trigg's question surely lies in the distinctive tradition of literary history w e have inherited. John Burrow has encapsulated the negative aspect of this tradition in the phrase 'churchy conservatism'. However, it is dso a tradition which insists that the writing of literary history must grow slowly out of scrupdous and selfdisregarding reading and re-reading — a tradition which many medievd English Reviews 133 literature students and teachers see- as being embodied in the man honoured through this festschrift George Russell. This distinctive tradition is now under threat. Not from post-modernist literary discourses but from an academic system under increasing politicd pressure to demand that research projects adapt themselves to short-term goals. For, as taught and practised by George Russell, literary history is literary interpretation in process. It cannot be hurried dong. 'To hear him talk about Langland', Penelope Curtis is quoted as saying in Vincent Buckley's fascinating dissection of 'George Russell as a Topic in his own Right', 'istosee something growing underground in the dark'. Piers Plowman, not surprisingly, is the subject of several of the essays in this book, dl written by scholars who have, like George Russell, Uved with Langland'stext-in-processover a number of years. R.A. Wddron re-reads the Passion and Hanowing of Hell passus as 'a chdlenge to the imagination and intellect', culminating in a consolatio. E. Tdbot Donddson offers a very persond translation of 'Long Will's Apology'. A.I. Doyle's fact-ful 'remarks' remind us how greatly Piers scholarship is still indebted to the impersond acts of attention of pdaeographers. James Simpson, 'The role of Scientia in Piers Plowman', continues his brilliantly lucid andysis of the intellectud action of the Vita de Dowel begun in 'From Reason to Affective Knowledge: Modes of Thought and Poetic Form in P.P.', Medium JEvum, 55, 1986, 1-23. These essays speak with very different scholarly voices, but they dl understand themselves, and at times explicitly acknowledge themselves, as being interim interpretations. In what I find a provocative contrast, the...