The tempter's voice: language and the Fall in medieval literature (review)

186 Reviews the Istituto E. Franceschini, Certosa di Firenze, ed. C. Leonardi. In other words, we have in these two volumes a complete and readable translation that does not claim to be any closer to what Jacobus wrote than the Latin edition by Graesse, which, if we may believe, Graesse took from 'an edition . . . preserved in the Royal Library in Dresden' (I, p. xiii). Graesse's actual preface is a litde more specific (pp. I—III of the 1850 Leipzig edition). Its reliability as a translation may be judged, perhaps, from the choice, in the life of St Dominic, of 'soldier' to translate miles, which is 'chevalier' in the medieval French versions, and 'slave' to translate servus, 'serf. In the life of St Ambrose, 'pleaded cases in the courts' translates 'causas praetorii... peroraref. The present translation is 'new' in that it modernizes and re-phrases much of the old, although extensively re-using the latter. It supplies bibliographical references not in the old version. The lives are now numbered continuously, as they were by Graesse, but lack the useful festival date supplied in the 1941 edition. There are approximately the same number of lives, with some small changes of order. Annotation is sparse and the few, inconsequential, illustrations of the 1941 edition are omitted. There is an index to each volume, rather than one to the whole. There can be no doubt that the present volumes are the version of the Golden Legend that will be in the hands of English-speaking scholars and others interested in the details of central medieval religious beliefs for the forseeable future. Its appearance must be welcomed, for who can predict when someone will attempt another, based on all the research envisaged by the present translator? John O.Ward Department of History University of Sydney Jager, Eric, The tempter's voice: language and the Fall in medieval literature, Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1993; cloth; pp. xvii, 336; 7 figures; R.R.P. ? A variety of m o d e m traditions of cultural and textual analysis clearly contributed to the formation of this book. At least in his introduction and conclusion Eric Jager declares an interest in the deconstructive turn language takes in the work of theorists such as Derrida, for w h o m the 'sign is always a sign of the Fall' (p. 8), but he plainly owes a much greater debt to Reviews 187 historicist critics of an earlier generation. In effect he offers a history of how the Fall gave point to, and, as a source of significantfigures,provided a set of terms for medieval reflections upon language, concentrating on hermeneutics and rhetoric and on issues such as the problematic relationship between speech and writing. This history, proceeding for the most part by what we might call intersectional textual analyses, seems modelled on something like Auerbach's Mimesis. Jager's primary debt, however, must betoD. W . Robertson. Indeed, his work here ends up looking vulnerable to the charge often levelled against Robertson, who saw gardens in the shades of most texts and Charity as then proper denizen. Jager sees gardens everywhere, but what catches his eye is the track of the Serpent. Augustine dominates this book. Along with Ambrose he provides its patristic anchor, holding firm Jager's analytical commentaries on later literarytextsdealing with the Fall such as Avitus' Poematum, Genesis B and, to a much lesser extent, the Jeu d'Adam. Jager's argument is that Agustine establishes in effect a position on language that could then be appropriated for a variety of distinct, sometimes unanticipated purposes. So, consciousness of language's fallen condition focuses variously on heresy, on monastic suspicion of oral tradition and eventually on particular threats to good order within secular, patriarchal, feudal society. This last extension of the story of language's implication in the Fall is seen in monitory passages in a pah oftextsdesigned for the supervision of women: Ancrene wisse and Le livre du chevalier de la Tour Landry. Here Eve, who for Augustine played an instructively central role in the story of language's 'originary' fall from grace, becomes the target for what that story teaches. Finally Jager works at...