Later Medieval English Literature (review)

This comprehensive and engaging survey grows from Douglas Gray’s long scholarly commitment to the literature of a period which he has done so much to rehabilitate—suitably dignified in the title of a 1997 Festschrift in his honor as “the long fifteenth century.” Offered modestly as “a kind of guidebook for the curious traveller,” the book maps the literary contours of the years from around 1400 to 1530 in generously descriptive detail. The texts covered are organized conventionally enough into sections on “prose,” “poetry,” “Scottish writing” and “drama,” but each section contains its own multitudes, and one would be hard pressed to think of a work or a genre that does not get a mention. Schoolboy vulgaria, medical receipts and charms, “merry tales,” ballads, and anonymous lyrics are all here alongside longer works by the likes of Lydgate and Pecok and More and Malory. Gray is avowedly keen to avoid arguing for particular “messages,” whether those of individual texts or of larger cultural tendencies, but he provides in the first part of the book three chapters that explore the private, public, and technical aspects of late medieval human existence with compelling illustrative detail. Some gestures are made in these chapters (and intermittently in the rest of the book) to identifying “Dionysian” and “Apollonian” strands in late medieval culture, but such generalization is mostly avoided, and the introductory chapters concentrate rather on textual evidence relating to contemporary views on travel, exploration, nationhood, and geography; to court and popular culture; to bodily and mental health; to education, literacy, and language; and (in some especially absorbing pages) to the functioning of words and images in late medieval piety.

Within the succeeding sections of the book, individual chapters map roughly onto the divisions in Gray’s Oxford Book of Late Medieval Verse and Prose (first published in 1985): the anthology’s collection of “Nifles, Trifles, and Merry Jests,” for example, is complemented in the new volume by a chapter on “Tales, Jests, and Novelle in Prose”; the anthology’s section of “Chaucerian poems” by a chapter here with the same title. The method within individual chapters, after a paragraph or so of introductory discussion, is fairly straightforwardly descriptive. This has a number of virtues. The book is an enormously useful compendium of summaries, and enables readers efficiently to find out about and contextualize individual texts or genres (a short opening chronology and an unfussy index are further aids, although the amount of bibliography offered is strictly limited to editions and secondary works cited in discussion; one slightly irksome feature is that quotations are not referenced in any way). The summaries themselves are deft and illuminating, often witty, and full of well-chosen quotation—enough of this at times to give a spurious sense of close acquaintance with a work one has never read, and likely to be dangerously seductive for the student pressed for time. In the parts of the book occupied by summary, the writing is strikingly fluid, accommodating asides and parentheses alongside the many quotations in ways that give the flavor of an agreeable talk rather than of formal written discourse. Only when the end of a summary coincides with the end of a chapter does this strike an odd note, leaving one slightly high and dry as if suddenly deserted by an acquaintance in the middle of a conversation.

Gray’s previous publications have included substantial studies of Henryson (Robert Henryson, 1979) and of Middle English religious lyrics (Themes and Images in the Medieval Religious Lyric, 1972), and he has done much to draw attention to Henryson’s brilliance of style and to the imaginative power of a number of Middle English short poems. His perspicacity in noting features and effects of style and of narrative structure, and in exploring “the traditional imaginary museum which was well stocked with images and themes often derived from the liturgy or the Bible” (372), is in evidence throughout Later Medieval English Literature. The sections in this book on lyrics and on Henryson and other...