The Devil's Rights and the Redemption in the Literature of Mediaeval England (review)

216 Reviews Accordingly, a large part of the 80-page Introduction is devoted to contextualising the prefaces, providing historical background and so forth. It is followed by a substantial bibliography of works mentioned in the Introduction. The explanatory notes, largely devoted to identifying figures named in the texts or scriptural passages, seem pitched at an audience beginning medieval studies. Each text is presented uncluttered by the apparatus usually ignored by students grappling with the basics of comprehension, and the emendations and transcriptional minutiae are removed to a section of textual notes at the end. One might expect, therefore, more in the way of aids to translation, either in a section on language in the introduction, or in the notes. As in Magennis's edition, the glossary is comprehensive, and parses the individual forms and occurrences of words. The book, however, lacks the kind of syntactic notes and other language material that Magennis provides. In examining one of the more orthographically difficult texts, the Preface to the Letter to Sigeferth (8d), which survives in the mid-twelfth-century manuscript Cotton Vespasian D.xiv, I found that the glossary's general comprehensiveness and accuracy failed. The spelling form emb is not cross-referenced to or listed under ymb; nor main to mann. Healden does not appear under the entry for healdan. There is no entry for the verb semen. Gewriten in the phrase on /Engliscen gewriten does not appear under gewrit, nor is the irregularity of inflexion discussed. Most texts, fortunately, are preserved in more regular late West Saxon form. This book proves a useful tool for introducing students to iElfric, his works and the culture of the reformed monasteries, but the teacher may find it necessary to provide further aids to translating the texts it contains. Greg Waite Department of English University of Otago Marx, C. W., The Devil's Rights and the Redemption in the Literature of Mediaeval England, Cambridge, D. S. Brewer, 1995; cloth; pp. x, 184; 4 illustrations; R.R.P. £29.50, US$51.00. The notion of the traditional rights over mankind held by the Devil is a theological concept much used in the (surviving) medieval literature produced in England. Necessarily it needs to be considered closely in the appraisal of these various formulations concerned with the redemption. There Reviews 217 has been a tendency to regard its presence in these texts as anachronistic, an inheritance from patristic writing. Marx's study is concerned to detect the persisting influence of such theological arguments and concepts in literary texts. The selected topics are treated sequentially and in considerable detail: the twelfth-century controversy and its origins; commentaries on and encyclopaedic texts treating of this matter; the Gospel of Nicodemus; Grosseteste's Chasteau d'Amour; various instructional writings; and various more or less familiar mystery plays. The Sentences of Peter Lombard (c. 1100-60), one of the most widely used textbooks of theology in the twelfth century, followed on from the Augustinian formulation that the Devil was responsible for the death of Christ, and that God was just in freeing humanity from the Devil who had abused his given power. Christ's death, then, meant the forgiveness of human sins and so the reconciliation of man with God. As in De Trinitate, the language of ransom—redemptio and pretium—recalled for early historians the 'ransom theory' which had been used by such Greek theological writers as Origen and Gregory of Nyssa. But the Devil's inability to understand the true nature of Christ meant his inevitable defeat. Yet it seems that Augustine's statements 'imply that God chose to respect some element of right in the Devil's possession of humanity which was over and above that power which depended upon humanity's state of sin' (p. 15). This power seems to have givenriseto the notion of iura diaboli. In this formulation and its derivatives, the Devil is conceived as a figure within a controlled model of society—a servant of the king, a jailer, and a law-breaker to be treated like any other such. In the second chapter Marx turns to biblical commentaries, to the Glossa Ordinaria, Aquinas and the commentaries of Hugh of St. Cher...