The Visual Object of Desire in Late Medieval England (review)

Framing her subject as the broad category of medieval objects of desire both material and literary, Sarah Stanbury investigates a series of visual moments in late medieval English culture, assessing each within the context of the image debates of late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century England. To do so she employs a variety of theoretical discourses and perspectives, largely from anthropology, economics, and cultural studies. The result is a densely argued book arranged in a series of topical groups whose titles suggest the complex interplay among subjects and perspectives marking the discussions that unfold in successive chapters.

Stanbury begins with a theorized introduction that introduces the idea of the premodern fetish, an object of imputed value that circulates within varying "markets" whose exchange processes transform imputed value into reified value. A section titled "Fetish, Idol, Icon" containing two chapters," Knighton's Lollards, Capgrave's Katherine, and Walter Hilton's 'Merk Ymage'," and "The Dispenser Retable and 1381," follows this introduction. The first of these two chapters considers Lollard anxiety about fetishizing the attractive materiality of images by focusing first on Knighton's chronicle narrative about how two Lollards come at last to chop up and burn an image of St. Katherine that they both despise and fear. The discussion then moves to the materiality of saints' images, asking how the attributes of individual saints—Katherine's wheel, or Lawrence's gridiron—invoke concepts in what is ultimately a larger, communal system of shared meaning, or whether they remain tied to the physical materiality of a specific image in a specific place. The second chapter in this section reads the successive panels of the Despenser Retable at Norwich Cathedral as a "narrative of social order—or more precisely, of disorder and harmony" (p. 80). Tying the Retable directly to Norwich through heraldic images and artistic style, Stanbury raises the question of whether the Retable was associated with the city's response to the Rising of 1381. Without being able to answer this question definitively, she nevertheless creates a compelling reading of the retable as a visual narrative of disruption giving way to order and suggests a minatory dimension to its communal message of Church, city, and aristocratic unity.

The second section of the book, "Chaucer's Sacramental Poetic," shifts the focus of attention from physical images to verbal images. The first chapter in this section, "Chaucer and Images" (chap. 3), asks if, and to what degree, Chaucer's descriptive practice was influenced by affective piety, particularly in respect to viewed images. In addition to the expected subjects of such an inquiry—the highly visual third section of The Knight's Tale, the Troilus, the Pardoner's relics—this discussion also reads the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women as a site where Chaucer "develops a critical aesthetic that… engages directly if ironically with the [image] debate" (p. 111), specifically in regard to the image function of books and the daisy. The persuasiveness of what is essentially an argument that both the daisy and the book of the Prologue are empty signs is blunted by the fact that the phototropic daisy, which Stanbury says "morphs" into Alceste, can also be read as a highly functioning image, a material sign of the spiritual virtues Alceste embodies. Similarly, one could argue that Chaucer creates the verbal image of the book as an object of desire that almost universally evokes a plethora of associations beyond itself. The chapter on Griselda considers Griselda as an image in her various transformations in The Clerk's Tale, but settles on a correlative topic, her vernacular speech, as its final point. Stanbury suggests that the tale "sacralizes vernacular" poetry and vernacularity itself, for while Griselda as cultic image is an unstable figure, her language is uncompromised and unvarying. The fifth chapter in the book, and the third in the section on Chaucer and images, "The Clergeon's Tongue," adapts the object-of-desire...