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

Reviewed by:
  • Mindful Spirit in Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth D. Kirk
  • Kevin Gustafson
Mindful Spirit in Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honor of Elizabeth D. Kirk. Edited by Bonnie Wheeler. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Pp. xiii + 266. $69.95.

The festschrift is an odd, and oddly academic, genre. Essays are commissioned for personal rather than thematic reasons, and the motley result often allows a reader to feel justified in looking at items of particular interest and largely ignoring the rest, safe in the assumption that there is no larger argument or important thematic connections. Yet the critical polyvocality of the festschrift is also potentially a source of interest, with such volumes revealing the diversity of critical approaches and methodologies at a particular point in time. It is a pleasure to see both coherence and healthy diversity in the seventeen essays in Mindful Spirit, a collection honoring Elizabeth Kirk, emerita Professor of English at Brown University.

Kirk is best known for the groundbreaking monograph The Dream Thought of Piers Plowman (1972) and her work with Mary Carruthers on completing E. Talbot Donaldson's translation of the C-text of that poem. It is thus fitting that two essays at the center of Mindful Spirit deal with this most difficult of Middle English works. Denise Baker develops a central topic in Kirk's book: how, and indeed why, the poet of the B-text retained the Vita of the A-text. For Baker, the transformation of Passv s 9 and 10 of the A-text indicates both a decreasing faith in the mental faculty and a greater place for charity in the scheme of salvation. Using a radically different methodology, Elizabeth Robertson draws on contemporary gender theory to consider the depiction of the soul in the B-text; for her, the movement from a fairly conventional depiction of Anima in Passus 9 as a damsel to be defended to the intentionally confused gender of Anima/Animus of Passus 15 marks both a complication in conceptions of the soul and the growth of Will's intellectual and affective discernment.

Several other essays explore ways in which fourteenth-century English texts reflect and respond to crucial religious and legal issues that were treated more discursively in Latin. Nicole Crouch's "Misbehaving God" considers the dual significance of childhood in the relatively unknown "Infancy of Jesus Christ," in which the erratic behavior of the young Jesus both expresses the alterity of God (the potentia absoluta of fourteenth-century theologians) and offers a lesson in obedience, as exemplified in Jesus' ready submission to Mary. Equally parabolic, argues Robert Sturges, is the depiction of the Passion in Middle English cycle plays. Drawing on Agamben's recent discussion of the force of the ban, Sturges argues that the reduction of Jesus to "bare life" in these plays, even while appearing to remove him from Jewish and Roman systems of justice, asserts a higher law. Kroll's essay on the Fall of Angels and Fall of Man in the York Cycle returns to an issue treated by Baker, the relation between divine omnipotence and free will, though Kroll sees the York playwright as engaged in a quite different problem of representation: how to create space for human agency in a world governed by an omnipotent and omniscient God. Finally, Liam Purdy demonstrates how [End Page 255] the Middle English poem "Als I Lay in a Winteris Nyt" meditates on the medieval theology of the second death, a perpetual struggle between the body and soul following the first, physical death.

Many essays in the collection follow Kirk's interest in the influence of a predominantly Latin clerical culture on Middle English religious texts. Others are concerned with intellectual culture more specifically. In a learned and wide-ranging piece, Mary Carruthers teases out some of the moral ambiguities of sweetness, as the term was applied to knowledge, rhetoric, and medicine in the Middle Ages. Lawrence Clopper's "Inventing Mentalities" details the Franciscan reworking of a complex mnemonic device-Alain of Lille's cherub-in ways that shift it from the penitential orientation befitting the Carthusian to the charitable actions emphasized by Franciscans. Alastair Minnis's piece...

pdf

Share