Chaucer and the Late Medieval World (review)

Reviews 175 correspondingly disappointing that it arrives only at a negative book review of Writing and Rebellion. Too often in this book there is a breathless ninning after ideas, in the cause of collocating vaguely medievalist things which are certainly interesting but not in the end convincingly related. At times it represents n e w historicist bricolage at its worst; correspondingly, there is a lack of attention to detail: the Ivanhoe misatrribution; the fact that Chaucer quotations, supposedly from The Riverside Chaucer, are in fact randomly modernised. As some of the panellists in Dahood's collection say, there is one possible future for medieval studies in the links between popular culture and the Middle Ages. It will have to be more subtle than w e get from Biddick's book or w e will soon be asking, 'What was Medievalism?'. David Matthews School ofHumanities University ofNewcastle, Central Coast Campus Bisson, Lilllian M., Chaucer and the Late Medieval World, Basingstoke, Macmillan, 1998; cloth; pp. x, 294; R.R.P. US$45.00. Chaucer and the Late Medieval World is another of those books which ai to provide a broad introduction to a period and an author for readers w h o know little of either. In her preface, Professor Bisson describes Chaucer's poetry as 'part of an ongoing cultural conversation'; the intention of her book is provide for 'late twentieth-century readers w h o attempt to enter that conversation...the underpinnings that would render it meaningful' (p. ix). Moreover, her account of the period sees it as 'a turning point in Western culture, a time w h e n old assumptions were collapsing and new ones struggling to form' (p. vii). Accordingly, the picture of the world presented here attends to both 'the Gothic synthesis' and to the growing fragmentation of that synthesis. Bisson divides her material according to three major areas of medieval life—religion, class and commerce, and gender and sexuality— but begins with a more generalised 'world view' which explores first the key elements of the medieval belief system, and secondly the place and function of literature. 176 Reviews The first chapter, which discusses the period's 'conceptual framework', rightly observes that medieval culture is fed from two sources: 'the philosophical/scientific strand deriving mostly from GrecoRoman sources and the religious/theological strand rooted in Hebraic and Early Christian sources' (p. 3). Such a formulation perhaps ignores the degree to which early Christian theology is itself derived from Greek philosophy, but the identification of these two strands is nevertheless valid. However, it is the Greco-Roman that receives most attention. The Hebraic contribution to medieval thinking is briefly covered in a paragraph or two on typology before the discussion moves on to a solid, thorough account of Neoplatonism and Ptolemaic cosmology. Perhaps the most successful section of the book is that which deals with class and commerce. The account of the world of chivalry and of the conflicting ideologies that are to be found in that world would provide students with a balanced and reliable introduction; equally, the atmosphere of political and social unrest of the late fourteenth century, with its complex range of causes, is well discussed in the chapter which deals with peasant rebellion. Part of the success of this section is that it spends some time explaining the status quo before turning to the evidence of change and unrest. In the section on religion, by contrast, w e are confronted , immediately by a detailed account of 'The Church in Turmoil'. While i readers already familiar with the period will have some understanding of the institution in its more stable form, the student w h o seeks an introduction to the period will not get that balancing perspective. Similarly, the treatment on popular religion captures very well the excesses of piety j and devotional practice, but those things are only part of the late medieval world , and one cannot escape the feeling that the aspects of medieval culture that have been chosen for discussion are those that directly relate to the pilgrims and their pilgrimage to Canterbury. I felt a similar unease with the section on gender and sexuality. There is m u c...