Spenser's Moral Allegory by Sean Kane (review)

250Rocky Mountain Review significance. His appreciative discussion of Langland's use of the alliterative long line is particularly inspiring. Anyone interested in poetic techniques would be captivated by his explanation of how in Langland "alliteration can have a substantive phonetic existence independent of the metrical accents of a line" (79) and how an interplay between the two patterns can result. Two general comparisons of the works of Langland and Chaucer follow, both written in 1980, and both more interesting for the issues they raise than for any development of those issues. The remainder of the book, though, does develop arguments on textual issues and problems facing editors ofmedieval literary texts. It is here that his overriding assumption that "criticism, like what it criticizes, can be good or bad" (ix) emerges most clearly, and it is here that his work becomes most controversial. The article titled "Conjectural Emendation" gives Kane's justification for the editorial approach he and E. Talbot Donaldson took in their edition ofPiers Plowman . This article is appropriately anthologized with his criticism ofthe ManlyRickert edition of Chaucer, since that edition represents the principles behind a more conservative approach to editing. Many may feel that Kane's conjectural emendations may result in distorting conflations of disparate texts. Whether or not the reader agrees with Kane's perspective, in these essays his arguments are clearly set forth in a way that allows them to be discussed intelligently. Furthermore, in his final essay in the series Kane states that "the worst feature of the situation respecting the texts of Middle English literature is exemplified in some ofthe most important, which we use most often and cherish most, namely that the editions which present them are not open, an 'open edition' being one where the editor makes available all the evidence needed to check his conclusions and decisions" (229). Whether or not a reader agrees with Kane's emendations, Kane supplies the apparatus needed to check his readings and, though perhaps with some effort, reconstructs specific manuscript readings. Kane's work involves clear organization and consistency. As fashionable young professionals are turning from pesto and chocolate decadence to homemade meat and potatoes for a more various and balanced diet, so medievalists may be turning from post-structuralist approaches to literature to recognize some of the value in historical and textual approaches. LINDA MARIE ZAERR Boise State University SEAN KANE. Spenser's Moral Allegory. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989. 237 p. John Milton's homage to Spenser as a philosopher and teacher is sometimes quoted for its hyperbole—"Spenser . . . [is] a better teacher than Scotus or Aquinas ." Sean Kane's study, Spenser's Moral Allegory, shows us that Spenser is, indeed, a great moral philosopher by positing him firmly in the thinking ofsuch Book Reviews251 writers as Augustine, Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Hooker, Renaissance writers ofsermons, Cicero, Ovid, Plutarch, Ficino, Piccolomini, Tasso, Bryskett, Hurault, Ralegh, and Harvey. And the list can be much extended. With careful attention to fresh detail, Kane also presents Spenser's own translating genius as an allegorist and poet-philosopher of polarities and hierarchies, whose medieval progenitors receive new strength from his Medieval-Renaissance perspective and whose psychomachia looks forward timelessly to the epistemological and psychological subtleties of the twentieth century. Not only is the scholar satisfied in these tracings, but a careful reader ofSpenser also becomes excited with the interwoven antiquity and contemporaneity of Spenserian thought. The theme of the Faerie Queene, Kane points out, is enclosed in "The Cantos ofMutabilitie." Mutability ("time, change, randomness, variety"), seen as fatal decay, confronts seeming mutability, which is cyclic and eternal (84). However, as Kane warns, Spenser does not "think these matters through easily"; the poem is a "record of the struggle involved in placing a myth of human power beside a myth of sacred order" (x). Before discussing each of the books of Spenser's epic separately, Kane shows that Spenser's poetry accommodates two world views at a time when Christian humanism, involving a myth of power, needed to be recorded "both as paradigm and in precise and varying moral circumstance ." Kane believes Spenser anticipates "what we now acknowledge as the ecological design of life" (7). In this, Kane...