'Songes of Rechelesnesse': Langland and the Franciscans by Lawrence M. Clopper (review)

132ARTHURIANA cock carried off by a fox, Chaucer starts by hinting that Richard may have a fall, but at the end ofthe tale flatters the king by alluding to a moment ofttiumph early in his reign. When, during the Peasants' Revolt, the fourteen-year-old king bravely confronted the rebels who had just seen their leader mortally wounded, he declared himselftheir captain and thus defused the rebellion. Astell suggests that Chauntecleer's escape from the fox's jaws by advising him to taunt the 'proud chéries' chasing him is a parody ofthis event. She does a fine job ofusing the historical material to elucidate the poem, particularly the line famous as the only reference to the Peasants' Revolt in Chaucer's entire work, his comparison of the noise of the fox chase to that of 'Jack Straw and his mcincc'(Canterbury TalesVW. 629-30). In chapter 5, 'Penitential Politics in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Richard II, Richard ofArundel, and Robert de Vere,' Astell takes on a poem generally agreed to be even more detached from politics than the Canterbury Tales, and argues that it is really about 'what Lee Patterson has called "the subject of history"'(ii7). In fact, however, this chapter is only slightly infotmed by New Historicism, for it views history from the top down, focusing largely on court intrigue. It makes intricate parallels between, on the one hand, the Green Knight/Bertilak and Richard ofArundel, beheaded by Richard II in 1397, and on the other, Gawain and Robert de Vere, the king's favorite who was exiled by the Merciless Parliament of 1388. The point of the allegory, according to Astell, is to urge Richard to be humble and conciliatory like Arthur, rather than hotheaded and violent like Gawain. Thete is great value in the chapters on Langland, Gower, Chaucer, and the Gawainpoet with their focus on issues of the proper relation of king, nobles, and commons during the reign of Richard II. It comes as a surprise, then, when in her final chapter Astell leaps ahead 85 years to the reign of Edward IV. In 'Joan of Arc, Margaret of Anjou, and Malory's Guenevere at the Stake,' she argues that Malory, like the Gawainpoet , used Arthurian narrative for allegorical purposes because 'in 1468-69 Edward IV was facing a threat of deposition akin to that Richard had faced in 1398—1400' (138). This chapter, in fact, serves to weaken the argument she has been developing, for it suggests that the pattern of advice to princes is generic rather than specific to the court of Richard II. While Astell occasionally makes interpretations that turn poems into romans a clef, she also has a deft ability to anticipate, if not always to answer, the reader's objections. Political Allegory in Late Medieval England is a useful book. It vividly conveys the degree to which canonical fourteenth-century writers were rooted in their time, it is well researched, and its argument is clear. Both literary scholars and historians can learn much from it. ANNE SCHOTTER Wagner College Lawrence M. CLOPPER, 'Songes ofRechelesnesse': Langland and the Franciscans. Ann Arbor: University ofMighigan Press, 1997. Pp. xviii, 368. isbn: 0-472-10744-5. $52.50. This study is the culmination ofwork that Lawrence Clopper has done over several years on the importance of Franciscan thought in the fourteenth-century alliterative REVIEWS133 poem Piers Plowman. Before Clopper, the usual scholarly view was that the poem, especially in its longer B and C versions, bitterly attacked friars in general, and the Franciscans in particular, blaming them for much ofthe sorry state ofcontemporary Christianity. For example, the first major negative allegorical character in the poem, Meed, is fraudulently confessed by a friar, and at the end of the poem the English Church (Unity) is corrupted by the friar Sir Penetrans domos. Curiously, Clopper discusses neither scene in detail, but he does mount a complex, learned argument that Piers Plowman, instead ofbeing an assault on the friars from outside, is a reformist work written from within that 'systematically exhibits a Franciscan mentality, ideology, and spirituality' (3) and deliberately addresses a Franciscan audience (among others). The purpose of the poem is 'to hold...