A Concordance to the Complete English Poems of John Skelton (review)

<24 Reviews boundary, rather than vice versa. If so, medievalists could refine the anthropologicd theories they use. Few seem willing to attempt this. In short, most articles here appear unnecessarily timid. Chojnacki's insights into the complex agnatic, cognatic and friendly relationships siurounding Venetian marriages have huge unstated implications for Rendssance socid history. Hansen's subtle study of Griselda's subversive silence in Chaucer's 'Clerk's Tde' could, but does not, andyse the potentid demode destructiveness c o m m o d y imputed to medievd women. Strangely, the book ignores this darker side of women's power, although Eve's reputed success as temptress was paradoxicdly important in debarring her daughters from medievd public authority. Only Bell's article is dispensable. Its ridiculous cldm to tabulate all European laywomen book-owners, 800-1500, its wild leaps to unverifiable conclusions, and its overwhelmingly second-hand sources, disqudify it for inclusion in serious scholarship. This book fdls to ded with the great issues itraises,dthough these issues arise from the richness and variety of the contributors' research, and the book therefore deserves serious attention. Philippa Maddem Department of History University of Western Australia Fox, A. and G. Waite, eds, A Concordance to the Complete English Poems of John Skelton, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1987; pp.1001; R.R.P. U S $49.95. If a concordance is the bulky headstone that indicates that a poet's reputation has findly been ldd to rest with honour, then Skelton's is not so much overdue as distinctly premature. He received a burst of popularising enthusiasm in the twenties and thirties and a sluggish tide of scholarship in the sixties, but for a poet of his range, skill, learning and inherent complexity he has been remarkably little examined. There are extrinsic reasons for this, such as his fdlure to be a comfortably datable medievd or rendssance writer, and dso the disabling disrepute in which he fell in the sixteenth century. Then the intrinsic problems appear: he wrote neither improving narrative, nor introverted dream vision, nor passionate love poem, nor self-reflexive monologue. Instead, he offers art, craft registers of style, ranges of topoi, the regular business of a major and at the same time minor poet Reviews 125 This year in a medieval/rendssance M A course at Melbourne, based on the genres of lyric, narrative and satire, and seeking to problematise those categories, we found ourselves returningregularlyto Skelton,findinghis work a constant resource for the most elusive aspects of discourse and positioning. Not so much between Chaucer and Wyatt as about them (in more senses than one), Skelton enriches detdled study, especidly any andysis informed by the most recent waves of cdtural theory. Such a strong tool as a concordance is therefore doubly welcome; not just because they are great sources of hard and disruptive information, uncovering in its natural state an author's lexicd usus, but dso in this case opemng Skelton to the sorts of stylistic and semiotic analysis that have been made standard in the case of other writers. And especidly welcome too because the dictionaries, including the O and M E D , seem not to be fully abreast of dl the diverse Skeltonic practices with what for him were those dear recdcitrant things, words. With dignified pride Fox and Waite can cldm a substantid number of instances prior to the O E D - 92 unrecorded words or compounds and 30 unique compounds unrecorded, as well as the equdly significant 132 antedatings and 150 antedated senses. That establishes a real base of innovation to the methodologicd vitality of this concordance. But in addition to those structured-in features, a concordance lays bare at a glance its most delightfd and teasing information in itsreferencebanks, those strange and stirring locations of pldn, unexpected and sometimes dmost inexplicable information about word-usage. It is not so surprising tofindLatin terms like 'adversyte' and 'affeccioun' clustering in the orotund Magnyfycence ; nor yet will we be made to gulp by the uniquerepetitivepresence of the word 'de' in Elynour Rummyng. But it is a little more intriguing and beyond immediate grasp, to see that, of dl words, 'fayth' is almost restricted to those epics of infidelity, The Bowge of Court and Magnyfycence; with equd enigma, why does Collyn Clout so dominatingly employ the word 'grene'? Lexicd sets (of both sorts) can dispose The Garland ofLaurel to the word 'fame' and the hyperbolic modifier 'passyng'; but is it the nascence of renascence poetic that induces the word 'poetic' to recur only in the same late text? Magnyfycence might well hog 'myschief, but whatever leads Collyn Clout, agdn, to so love both 'people' and 'prelate': and is it emotionality or explicatoriness that leads The Bowge of Court to start so many clauses with 'Soo'? The concordance dso throws up some delicious single uses,testifyingto Skelton's expansive and funnybonish mind - here are 'versyng box*, 'wamblyng' (a non-Latinate moment in Magnyfycence), the scholasticd 'loquicious' and the down-home 'lylse walse'. 'Hastarddis' and 'handy dandy' are rare and coUoqdd 126 Reviews both, while the rustic 'Hay the Gye' and the lordly 'grandpose' dl swim equdly in these lexicd waters. Not everything is so intriguing. Ten pages of 'is' testify to a computer memory better accessed randomly, and it seems perverse to have respected every unedited variant spelling, so we can read of Against, Agaynst, Ageynst, Ageynste, Agennst and Agenst a process surely, as Skelton also says, Agen dl reason. All concordances have technicd mists like that, though not all as pervasive as these occasionally are on quite occasiond words. But only one compldnt of substance is not bad going for a reference book, one of size, precision, great utility and what seems aratherreasonable price. More on late medievd language is looked for, with loquicious wamblyng from the versyng boxes of Otago. Stephen Knight Department of EngUsh University of Melbourne F u h r m a n n , H., Germany in the High Middle Ages, c. 1050-1200, trans. T. Reuter, Cambridge, C.U.P., 1986; pp.vii, 209; paperback, R.R.P. A U S $25.00. Fuhrmann's volume is eminently worth translating and Reuter has done English-reading students of medievd German history a notable, and for the most part very well executed, service. The book must be recommended as the obvious textbook on its subject superseding and eschewing the excessively specdative, if more dramatic, 'over-interpretations' of previous writers in English such as Geoffrey Barraclough and Peter Munz. It yet retdns a sense of the major dramas enlivening German history in the period: the evolving forms of centralised governmentd strategies, the tensions between elective and hereditary kingship, between Church and State, between Welf and Hohenstaufen, the 'misfiring' of German leadership in Europe (to quote from R.W. Southern's Making of the Middle Ages). These large themes, which make Germany very much the focus for any modem student of European history in the period, are presented in a broad context with surprisingly deft references to parallel developments and contrasts in areas beyond the German Empire proper: England, Spain, southern Itdy, Scandinavia, Byzantium, and the Slavic East. There is unusually effective attention to the development of cultural forms (knightly chivalry and scholasticism, for example), general notions of time and space, and appropriate background materid in the areas of economic development and geography, transport and communications, the physicd conditions of living, and much more. The whole account, compact as it is, benefits greatly from a wedth of ...