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REVIEWS Aers, D., Community, gender and individual identity: English writing 13601430 , London, Roudedge, 1988; paperback; pp. viii, 215; R. R. P. AUS$29.95 (distributed in Australia by the Law Book Co.). 'The aim of m y own labours,' writes Aers, 'is to reconstruct at least some of the social practices, discourses, and struggles which comprised the text's moment, together with those pressures which help us understand what its maker found intractable, perhaps even sought to evade' (p. 18). This is not a new agenda. It is one that Aers as much as anyone has set for medieval English studies and has pursued with great integrity and fine results, as this excellent book demonstrates; although, some senior practitioners of the subject may have difficulty in coming to terms with it. Aers seems to expect this, as is made plain by his digressive and frequent attacks on the 'priestiy caste of American professors' (the phrase is Stephen Knight's). I do not think that many new students of medieval literature will have this trouble and I should like this to be one of the first critical books that fads into their hands because it is very well done, very much of the time. It is full of commitment and enthusiasm and never for a moment presents the study of medieval texts as a trivial retreat from 'community, gender and individual identity'. Even where one would want to take issue with Aers, supplement his account of discourses at work, or actually respond to his urging by going for more historical knowledge, his work is unfailingly provocative and worthwhile. The book consists of five parts: an introduction which urges engagement with the real social, economic and political issues that form and are formed by literary texts, together with intelligent remarks about the need for study that transgresses the boundaries of conventional disciplines; a chapter on Piers Plowman which contains, among other things, an enthralling reading of B Passus V-VII as constructing, then breaking down, the fantasy of 'an employers' Utopia' and which argues that the poem rejects this new model but 'actually conveys the doomed anachronistic nature of the neo-Franciscan ethos it cherishes' (p. 66); a reading of Margery Kempe in (highly effective) terms of 'the market's permeation of religious consciousness' (p. 79) revealed in her very desire to 'purchase more pardon'; a chapter entitied 'Masculine identity in the courtly community' on Troilus and Criseyde', and afinalchapter on Gawain that wiU have nothing to do with ironic or homiletic readings of the poem's chivalric virtue as public value. The most successful chapter is that on Margery, probably because it is the most-widely ranging across numerous fields of discourse and because Margery's text itself demands and ensures the detaded historical specificity that Aers righdy values but does not consistendy practise. The work on Troilus and on Gawain 118 Reviews mosdy is persuasive but is less wide-ranging and sometimes frustrates by not considering related issues from other chapters. Masculine love codes in a courtly community are brilliantly described within an eclectic, feminist, sociopsychological framework; however, it might also be relevant to observe that they offer a different model of exchange and value than, and in conflict with, the world of the market. Similarly, Gawain's Marian piety could have been explored, I suspect, along the lines of Aers's discussion of Margery's 'reinfantilization of Jesus' (p. 105), and it would have been interesting to hear Aers's views on how this sort of devotion assimilates with masculine courdy virtue. In this chapter on Gawain Aers seems perhaps over-anxious to resolve conflicts in discourse, rather than to 'reconstruct' them. The chapter on Piers will be valuable reading for students wanting to understand the poem's economic immediacy. But they should take care also to read Wendy Scase's new book 'Piers Plowman and the New Anti-clericalism (Cambridge, 1989), where they will find that there is a lot more yet going on than, and different from, a yearning for the traditional or cultivation of a 'neoFranciscan ' ethos. O n the evidence of Scase's book, the account given by Aers is actually insufficiendy contextualised or historicised...

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