Contrary Things: Exegesis, Dialectic and the Poetics of Didacticism (review)

182 Reviews Brown, Catherine, Contrary Things: Exegesis, Dialectic and the Poetic Didacticism (Figurae: Reading Medieval Culture), Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1998; cloth; pp. xiv, 209; R.R.P. £27.50. [Distributed in Australia by Cambridge University Press.] Having selected this book for review on the promise of its title, I w somewhat disconcerted, as a medieval historian, to discover that its subject is actually medieval literature and the author a professor of medieval Spanish. However, since the four chapters dealing with medieval exegesis and dialectic which form the prolegomenon to the reading of the literary texts constitute two thirds of the book I felt that I might legitimately undertake the task. That the book constructs itself as consciously interdisciplinary, encompassing 'medieval literary studies, philosophy, and literary theory' and contributing to 'the mutual opening of these borders' (p. 4) was also encouraging. O n reading the book I found m y temerity richly rewarded. This work, like the writings it treats, m a y be read on several levels. Its chief aim is to enable modern students of medieval literature to read in the spirit of the text. As Professor Brown remarks: 'to fail to read a text in its difference from the reader is, quite simply, a failure to read, a failure to teach and be taught by the text in its otherness' (p. 11). In what does such otherness consist? Part of the problem is that readers of medieval literature, including such canonical texts as The Canterbury Tales and the Roman de la Rose get mixed messages, the 'contrary things' of the title. Various interpretive strategies have been suggested to overcome this difficulty, from Huizinga's idea that medieval life itself was characterised by a play of contraries, or D. W . Robertson Jr.'s notion that all such surface contradiction merely overlaid a single Christian message. Brown's w a y to reconcile these conflicting master narratives is to recognise that reading such works for their 'doctrine', understood simply as taught content, is a mistake. Her innovation is to point out the double meaning of 'doctrina': 'Teaching in these texts is poetic in the etymological sense: poiesis is (a) making, and medieval didactic texts constantly and insistently show us this making of doctrina in textual and hermeneutic process' (p. 10). In this way, the didactic element of medieval texts, so often a stumbling block to students, becomes an enabling device if we Reviews 183 understand the texts in their performative roles, that is, that they demonstrate h o w to teach/read as well as teaching their nominal content. Brown first examines h o w this works with the Bible and its exegesis, characterised by open-ended and multiple interpretations. This she contrasts with 'dialectic', as exemplified in the works of John of Salisbury and Peter Abelard. Briefly, she characterises monastic lectio divina as both-and, rath than the either/or of the dialectical method; the one carried out under the Augustinian Law of Charity, the other according to the Aristotelian Law of Noncontradiction. She then applies these results to a reading of Andreas Capellanus' De Amore and the Libro de Buen Amor of Juan Ruiz. All this is performed in such a w a y as to suggest that the author herself must be an mspiring teacher. Here I would point to her exuberant language which includes puns and (usually) apt metaphors. Thus: Translating these premodern metaphors into tropes more germane to our own age of spectacle and "information", w e might say that, for these readers, Scripture is an encrypted data file that must be, as it were, unzipped; exegesis is the unzipping, the unpacking. Or, alternatively, the Lord in his wisdom put apparently endless clowns in a single Volkswagen. Exegesis unlocks the door and then speculates in awe about what sort of vehicle this might be that can contain such infinitefigures'(p. 21). However this example also suggests that sometimes less might be more. I could have done without the Volkswagen (and w h y clowns?). Another example of too m u c h striving after effect is the unmanning of Dialectica in the segue to Chapter Three: 'We shall hear more of this unmanned dialectic...