The Poetics of Authorship in the Later Middle Ages. The Emergence of the Modern Literary Persona by Burt Kimmelman (review)

140ARTHURIANA (72). Yet, she is sensitive to the 'special degree of contingency which the female condition has historically imposed on women's texts' (55). Black, on the other hand, is forthright about the necessity offeminists being women and the feminist objective ofher project: to analyze how gender operates in power relations (29). So is Coldwell (4), who, furthermore, sees herself as editor and Wilkinson as writer mirrored in an etching by Henry Moore of two nude women walking on a tightrope towards each other, one reaching out to the other yet the two never closing the gap between them (22-23). Besides offering such theoretical, professional, and political themes, Editing Women makes specific contributions to the scholarship on each of the writers. For instance, Greer's scrutiny ofletters, the 1664 edition ofPhilips's Poems, and certain manuscripts leads to unsettling possibilities about who rewrote some of Philips's poems and collaboration among 'Royalist coteries' (98). Of special interest to medievalists is Riddy's slant on Julian's Revelation ofLove. For instance, she rejects the recluse image manufactufed by medieval and modern editors. Instead, she develops the plausibility of collaboration between Julian and a female friend and amanuensis, with whom Julian might have emigrated from the north to East Anglia, perhaps upon marriage. Furthermore, Riddy argues that the segments marked by large initials in the manuscript of the short text of Revelation arc misrepresented as chapters in the editions ofthat version. Instead, these segments are compositional stints (114), permitting us to witness the originary moment of writing. Later, Julian and her collaborator numbered the visions and listed them in order to convert them into chapters and to cross-reference them as she developed the long version (115-17). Thus, Julian 'textualized' her mental experience, transforming it into a book and herself into an author. Hutchinson's collection of essays interweaves introspective subjectivity, technical skill, and commitment to the fundamental work of textual criticism. This volume will find several places, among which will surely be graduate courses in research methods and critical theory; women's studies; and bibliographies ofsources for research on particular authors. SUE ELLEN HOlBROOK Southern Connecticut State University BURT kimmelman, The Poetics ofAuthorship in the Later Middle Ages. The Emergence ofthe Modern Literary Persona. Studies in the Humanities:Literature—Politics—Society, 21. New York and Bern: Peter Lang, 1996. Pp. 288. isbn: 0-8204-2856-6. $49.95. The question of when the discovery of the individual in the modern sense of the word occurred, either in the High Middle Ages or in the Renaissance, has been hotly debated in scholarship, a debate which forms part of the starting point of Burt Kimmelman's doctoral thesis written under Allen Mandelbaum's direction. In clear contrast to the mainstream in this debate, however, Kimmelman has opted for a different selection oftexts for his investigation, and consequently the kinds ofquestions he raises are quite unique. REVIEWS141 On the basis of a large number of primary and secondary sources the author develops a very dense and complex study focusing on questions such as when, how, and why the sense ofauthotship emerged in the later Middle Ages. He is especially intetested in the influential discourse developed by theologians and philosophers and traces their thought patterns to the literary documents created by Marcabru, Dante, Chaucer, and Langland, to mention just a few ofthe writers studied here. In explicit opposition to poststructuralist thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Kimmelman argues that self-naming, autocitation, and hence a clear concept of authorship were already highly relevant strategies for medieval authors in the twelfth century. But they did not simply derive these new notions from within themselves, but rather in direct response to the philosophical debates of the twelfth through fifteenth centuries carried out by personalities such as Augustine (354-430)—whose influence never fully waned throughout the Middle Ages—, Abelard, Thomas Aquinas, Anselm, and Ockham. Beginning with a thorough discussion of the new role of literacy and grammar, and hence ofthe book in the High Middle Ages, Kimmelman explores the significance of the new world view which claimed reality to be a book; this, in turn, required from the philosopher to read it letter by letter and...