Book and Verse: A Guide to Middle English Biblical Literature (review)

216 Reviews Parergon 20.2 (2003) mode of production and consumption of poetry by women, however, could have been more extensively discussed. The climate of writing and disseminating poetry was uncongenial for women of the period, who did not enjoy the allusiveness natural to a shared education and the cosiness of a male coterie. I was also disappointed that more was not said about Lanyer’s ‘To Cookhan’, and its subsequent eclipse in the annals of country-house poetry by Ben Jonson. In its reconstruction of early modern subjectivity, however, McGrath’s volume appears at a time when this topic is enjoying a vogue among cultural historians. The book as a whole is densely argued and thought-provoking. The general observations and theoretical summary offered in the first three chapters are especially useful, and could be extended towards the recovery of other forgotten seventeenth-century poets, of either gender. It would be a pity if the book remains defined too much as a contribution to feminist scholarship and is looked at only by those with a particular interest in Whitney, Cary or Lanyer. It provides a lot of new material and an approach which can be fruitfully applied to the shifting of poetic and authorial identity which occurred in those turbulent times which the book covers. Dosia Reichardt School of Humanities James Cook University Morey, James H., Book and Verse: A Guide to Middle English Biblical Literature (Illinois Medieval Studies), Urbana and Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 2000; cloth; pp. xviii, 428; RRP US$34.95; ISBN 025025075. It is always satisfying to see myths demolished, and James Morey does so convincingly. His book has two main purposes: ‘to explode the myth that lay people had no access to the Bible before the Reformation and to provide a guide to the variety and extent of biblical literature in England, exclusive of Wyclif, from the twelfth into the fifteenth century’ (p. 1). Notions of literacy have become more complex over the last decade and this valuable book not only contributes to the discussion of texts and their reception but also draws attention to the types of Bible story which entered into the community’s thought world. The bulk of the book describes the vast array of manuscripts which are Bible translations, or use some version of biblical and apocryphal stories. Morey provides manuscript details, a short introduction and a summary of the contents Reviews 217 Parergon 20.2 (2003) of the manuscripts and, usefully, some select quotations. He divides this extensive work into chapters on Comprehensive Old and New Testament Works, Primarily Old Testament Works, The Psalter, Canticles and Hymns, Miscellaneous Old Testament Pieces, Primarily New Testament Works, Temporale Narratives, Passion Narratives, Miscellaneous New Testament Pieces, Lectionaries, Prose Gospel Commentaries and Lives of Christ, Epistles and Versions of Revelation. Four indices provide a valuable supplement to a book which will be essential for scholars working in the field: an index of biblical characters, an index of biblical people, places and events, an index of manuscripts and a general index. The bibliography is comprehensive. The guide is prefaced by four chapters in which Morey explores aspects of the Bible in the medieval world. The Bible stories were disseminated through books, plays, sermons and poems, and Morey points out that in the Middle Ages, ‘the Vulgate was the Bible, but the Bible was not necessarily the Vulgate’ (p. 7). The Bible was sacred, but poets, paraphrasers and commentators could reshape biblical narrative to make sense of the bare text (p. 12). Any assessment of how medieval writers employed paraphrases, or how they may have understood their Christianity, must take into consideration this flexibility of approach. When the Old and New Testament are regarded as one story, governed by typological exegesis, then readers can interpret passages in light of other passages, but also their own lives in light of the Bible. Interpretation and adaptation argues that many authors had a more a personal participation in religion than has always been always acknowledged. Morey argues that although commentators clearly distinguished between the Fathers and the Bible, there was a ‘continuum from Scripture through the Fathers to these twelfth-century productions ... [and] the more liberal attitude...