Medieval Alliterative Poetry: Essays in Honour of Thorlac Turville-Petre (review)

This rich volume is a fitting tribute to Thorlac Turville-Petre's own contributions to the field of Middle English studies, contributions that have shaped our understanding of alliterative poetry and of national identity as it was articulated during the Middle Ages. The essays in the volume read like a bracing seminar composed of committed and genially argumentative scholars brought together around the topic of alliterative poetry whose importance and allure has grown, especially under the care of some of these assembled contributors.

Though the essays have been arranged alphabetically by author, they fall into four loosely conceived groups that provide the volume with more unity than it appears to have on a first reading. Essays devoted to Piers Plowman form the bulk of the volume, but essays on versification, on the use of sources, and on the thematic and social valences of alliterative poetry serve to locate Piers Plowman within a cultural milieu that is alliterative but certainly not isolated either geographically or linguistically. Or, put another way, the combined effect of the essays suggests a broadening scope for alliterative studies.

Robert Adams's exploration of the ideological affinities between Langland and thinkers belonging to the contemporary Dutch reform movement, the Devotio Moderna, a movement that John Van Engen has recently treated in his Sisters and Brothers of the Common Life (2008), is the first essay in the book. In "Langland and the Devotio Moderna: a Spiritual Kinship," Adams focuses on the movement's founder, Geert Grote, and the uncanny relationship between his insistence on seeking perfection while living in the world and Langland's exploration of perfection through the "Do-family" in the poem, as well as both writers' similarly directed excoriation of the lapses of the contemporary church. John Burrow, in "The New Lives of Piers Plowman," traces Langland's understanding of the figure and the work he was intended to do in the poem through the three texts, exploring the poetic integrity of Piers in terms of the registers of meaning he occupies throughout. Like Derek Pearsall in "The Poetic Character of the C-text of Piers Plowman," Burrow queries both the thinker and the poet. Both Burrow and Pearsall work from inside the poem, seeking to elucidate Langland's craft, his poetic instincts as they, in turn, express what is a theological meaning that comes through the poetry rather than being imposed from outside upon the poem. A. V. C. Schmidt, in "The Sacramental Significance of Blood in Piers Plowman," explores the sacramental significance of image-clusters that indicate Langland's focus upon the "Eucharistic event as the convergence-point of sacred history, past, present, and future" (p. 222). John Scattergood ("On the Road: Langland and Some Medieval Outlaw Stories") describes Langland in relation to contemporary outlaw tales, which he knew, but which also suggest that we read Piers as belonging to a culture of indigenous tales and lyrics that depend upon a land whose roads linking towns also provide paths through forests and wastelands and thus serve as routes for both merchants and outlaws, or upon a land characterized by travel. These are rewarding essays by scholars whose work on medieval poetry, and on Piers in particular, has set a standard for us all. Judith A. Jefferson ("Divisions, Collaboration and Other Topics: the Table of Contents in Cambridge, University Library, MS Gg.4.31") argues for a relationship between the chapter divisions, the table of contents, and the index in the manuscript and the ways in which a late manuscript of the B-text of Piers Plowman may have been read by its scribe.

Both Hoyt N. Duggan ("The End of the Line") and A. S. G. Edwards ("The Blage Manuscript and Alliterative Verse in the Sixteenth Century") focus on the making of alliterative verse as having a history extending from the Anglo-Saxon past to the sixteenth century, in which there is some evidence for ongoing interest in and...