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310 Short notices scholasticism and humanism, but also of the Reformation itself. W e are warned of the danger that lies in dunking diat die Reformation can be identified with any single doctrine or set of doctrines. Thus the contrast between the Lutheran and Reformed Reformations is here drawn very sharply, something that enables McGrath to relate diem to very different intellectual contexts. Finally, sophistication is achieved above all by the fact that McGrath really does mean 'origins' and not 'causes'. He is well aware that out of the complexities of late-medieval and Renaissance religion many things could have emerged and did so. To talk of causes would be to oversimplify, to render trite and misleading die connections between the Reformation and its pasts. 'The quest for die intellectual origins of the Reformation thus concerns not die identification of a single factor, nor even a group of factors, which may be said to have caused the movement, but rather concerns the unfolding of a complex matrix of creatively interacting intellectual currents' (p. 197). Intellectual origins harmonizes with much recent Reformation scholarship that stresses botii the intellectual and spiritual vitality of late medieval religion and the continuities between medieval and Reformation religion. It deserves a wide readership. From it we can gain much insight into what is involved in constructing a truly historical understanding of Reformation history, free from die confessional blinkers of the past. Glenn Burgess Department of History University of Canterbury Terry, Patricia, trans., The honeysuckle and the hazel tree: medieval st of men and women, Berkeley/Los Angeles/London, University of California Press,. 1995; cloth and paper; pp. x, 281; R.R.P. US$35.00 (cloth), $13.00 (paper) This book contains translations into English verse of eight well-known medieval French poems about love: the tale of Philomena attributed to Chrehen de Troyes,fivelays of Marie de France (The nightingale, The two lovers, Honeysuckle, Lanval, and Eliduc), Jean Renart's lay The reflection, and the anonymous tale of The chatelaine of Vergi. A previous collection by Terry, Lays of courtly love (1963), contained earlier versions of diese translations, except for Philomena and Lanval. These two have been added Short notices 311 because their respective subjects, violence against women and female power, are deemed to be of interest to a new generation. The octosyllabic verse of the French originals has been turned into English rhyming couplets. According to the preface, the translations 'are not intended to serve the purposes of scholars requiring a word-by-word version', but rather 'to reproduce the literary experience of reading the poems', in search of which the reader is enjoined to try reading aloud. The translation is indeed not literal. Often, in fact, it goes so far as not to give an idiomatically accurate version of the French, which is, in m y experience, the kind of translation scholars are actually likely to prefer over a word-forword version that distorts the plain meaning. What w e have here is a practice of notional equivalence in large units which correspond to the modem sentence or paragraph, something justtiiisside of paraphrase. Thefirstfew lines of Honeysuckle (Chevrefoil) sufficiently exemplify the approach taken. The overall import of the French is represented in the English, and is given equal space. But, with significant generic implications, the lay is designated a 'romance' in the English though not in the French, and the loaded French statement that the love of Tristan and the queen was 'tantfine'is not represented in the English. Again, a nuance of dramatic focus is lost through a grammatical shift from active to passive voice where, in thefirstsentence of the actual narrative, the foregrounded subject is Tristan, rather than Mark. The demands of rhyme and regular metre inevitably cause such problems in matters of detail, which is the main reason why scholarly translations of medieval verse are usually in prose or free verse. Terry has, nevertheless, produced pleasantly readable texts in language that is natural enough in both usage and speech rhythm. They will at least serve to introduce these stories from medieval France to new-comers. In keeping with such an aim, the introduction offers a standard overview of the rise...

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