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Enacting the Sacrament: Counter-Lollardy in the Towneley Cycle by Lauren Lepow (review) - Comparative Drama
- Western Michigan University
- Volume 26, Number 2, Summer 1992
- pp. 188-189
- 10.1353/cdr.1992.0005
- Review
- Additional Information
188Comparative Drama complex, multivalent, and layered at best—to either art or social class at a remove of almost five centuries. Some reservations are inevitable in response to any complex and ambitious analysis; those expressed here do not diminish the great value of S0ndergaard's interpretation and commentary in establishing Den utro hustru as a work of genuine dramatic and literary significance. In its care, learning, and interdisciplinary breadth S0ndergaard's book is an important contribution to the study of medieval drama. Its English summary captures most of the important conclusions but, unfortunately, the richness of the discussion will not be accessible to most readers outside Scandinavia. S0ndergaard's colleague Tom Pettitt has prepared a lively verse translation which, when published (as the introduction seems to promise), will make this entertaining and important play much more accessible to an international audience. LARRY SYNDERGAARD Western Michigan University Lauren Lepow. Enacting the Sacrament: Counter-Lollardy in the Towneley Cycle. Rutherford, Madison, Teaneck: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990. Pp. 167. $28.50. Enacting the Sacrament has an important subtitle: Counter-Lollardy in the Towneley Cycle. At first glance the order of chapters seems to reverse that of the titles, for the initial section is entitled "Orthodoxy and Lollardy" and the second "The Cycle Enacts the Sacrament." In fact, Lepow's explication of selected Towneley plays in the last six chapters is focused by the lenses of her counter-Lollardy thesis. The sacramental imagery and eucharistie affirmation of the plays, she contends, confirmed the faith of the audience threatened by heretical Lollard teaching. The author is at her best when she engages in close reading of the Towneley plays. Theologically inclined readers will find much to their taste (though others may be a bit uneasy about protopriests and hypermasses). Lepow is less convincing, however, when she attempts to press those readings to support her thesis, for she tends to rely on assertion rather than demonstration. The author begins by distancing herself from authorial intent, which she grants is not susceptible of proof, but proposes to speculate concerning how the audience watching the plays reacted to "encoded" antiLollard messages. The chapters are liberally sprinkled with phrases like "the audience sees/recognizes/understands." Leaving aside the epistemological questions, the reader expects at least to have the audience identified, to find some reference to where the plays were performed (the issue is not addressed, but presumably the author accepts Wakefield as venue) and to be provided a circumstantial case for a fifteenth-century Lollard threat in that area. And readers expect to have that evidence provided before the argument continues—certainly before they are willing to be conjured into seeing the "specter of Wyclif" arise from the text of the Towneley plays. Yet Lepow grants in the first chapter that Lollardy was a belated sixteenth-century arrival in the north and provides no documentation for its presence in Wakefield. (Evidence drawn from Reviews189 Salop or Norfolk is hardly convincing for Yorkshire.) Are we therefore to assume that she is concerned only with the sixteenth-century audiences of the plays? These problems point up the essential flaw of the book, a failure in methology. Granted, Lepow has been trained in literary criticism, and her readings are often sensitive and provocative, but anyone who pretends to deal with Lollardy necessarily moves into the discipline of history. Unfortunately, the author ignores the most elementary premises of historical scholarship. In her reliance on secondary sources, Lepow fails to discriminate between marginal, out-of-date work and current scholarship. For "documented . . . Lollard perversions of the Mass," for example, she cites a 1936 source rather than Anne Hudson ("A Lollard Mass" [1972]; rpt. Lollards and their Books, 1985) or Margaret Aston ("Lollard Women Priests?" [1980]; rpt. Lollard and Reformers, 1984, a book included in the bibliography). Of the Aston and Hudson works she cites, the author seems to have only superficial acquaintance, for she is unaware that both authors are highly skeptical that any of the English works formerly attributed to Wyclif were actually written by him ("none provably his"—Aston; "evidence in favor of Wyclifs authorship ... of any English works, is very poor"—Hudson). The author relegates to a footnote the possibility...