Literature and religion in the later Middle Ages: philosophical studies in honour of Siegfried Wenzl (review)

282 Reviews Newhauser, Richard G. and John A. Alford, eds, Literature and religion in the later Middle Ages: philosophical studies in honour of Siegfried Wenzl (Medieval & Renaissance texts and studies, Vol. 118) Binghamton, Medieval & Renaissance texts and studies, 1995; cloth; pp. ix, 414; R.R.P. US$25.00. In an article contributed to a special forum in Speculum (1990), Siegfried Wenzel offered a description of philology which he derived from its etymological meaning, love of the word, and which he used to assert the continuing importance of philological study. That assertion is echoed in the introduction to this festschrift in Wenzel's honour, which begins with the unequivocal statement that philology is 'the foundation for all our future insights into literary discourse'. Such a statement may seem eidier narrow or reactionary, a defensive stand by medievalists hostile to contemporary theory. In fact, Wenzel's notion of a philologist as a 'historian of literature who makes written documents the subject of study and who looks at them as verbal art' is neither narrow nor reactionary. It can readily accommodate a wide range of critical approaches, includingtiieoreticalapproaches. The introduction also seeks to validate this conception of the breadth of philological approaches to literature, in part by pointing to the range of Wenzel's work over the last thirty or more years, and in part by detailing the variety of approaches and the range of subjects found in this collection. What the essays demonstrate, individually and collectively, is what is common to contemporary philological study, namely an insistence that texts and the language oftextsbe studied not in isolation but rather within the immediate context of the manuscript within whichtiieyare preserved and within the wider social, religious, literary, and political contexts within which they are shaped. Philology, in essence, is a species of cultural studies. Four essays deal with Chaucerian poems. Albert Hartung offers a speculative, and unprovable, response to "The Parson's tale' which reads it not just as a treatise about penance but as a penitential act in its own right, with corresponding significance. What seems to weaken die argument is the failure to articulate a distinction between penitential writing and acts of penance. It may well be that writing a treatise is itself a penitential act, but the way in which this shift might operate needs to be more closely Reviews 283 addressed. Much more cautious is Stemmler's reading of 'To Rosemounde', which compares Chaucer's apparently hyperbolic language to other expressions of love in Middle English and Old French. In doing so it offers a valuable corrective to the many efforts to read the poem as parody. Irving's comparison between "The Knight's tale', and Beowulf is an essentially traditional, though highly readable, approach. Boitani, by contrast, makes comparisons with m o d e m literature, linking 'The Nun's Priest's tale' to La Fontaine, Dryden, Orwell, and Kafka. In doing so, he provides what is undoubtedly the most entertaining of the essays, exploiting something of the playfulness of Chaucer's language as he explores the openendedness inherent in the tale and consequent theoretical problems of interpretation. These four essays are primarily literary in their focus. Others deal with afieldin which Wenzel has been especially productive, namely the linking of 'two seemingly disparate worlds of discourse': those of penitential instruction and either poetic narrative or lyric verse. Each of the two essays on lyric poems repeats an observation that Wenzel has long insisted on: the importance of considering manuscript contexts in any assessment of lyric poetry, especially those lyrics which occur within homiletic or pastoral material. Newhauser's contribution is valuable for its edition of a Latin prose treatise containing a short poem in English, a poem for which the allegorical interpretation is expounded in the Latin treatise. But Reichl's essay provides litde more than an expanded description of the manuscript contents and the ensuing discussion is disappointingly brief. The combination of 'disparate worlds of discourse' is also the focus of three essays which deal with Piers Plowman. Hanna examines Langland's revisions in the C-text of the scene of Robert the ruyflare in the confession of the seven deadly sins, arguing that this...