Alliterative Revivals by Christine Chism (review)

REVIEWS 217 However, Burrow goes on to point out that it is those very courtly circles that are most likely to read subtle meanings into small gestures. And he is very good at pointing out the layers of social meaning that a gesture may have— cross-culturally, diachronically, and within the texts themselves, where he shows an excellent understanding of NVC in social context, from equivocal kisses between friars and housewives (17) to the negotiations within status relations suggested by various types of kneeling, including the over- or underperforming of the gesture, or the failure to perform it at all (31). He is also quick to point out the limits of our understanding, as in the problem of identifying what is meant by gestures such as hand-clasping and hand-shaking (34–36), where the words themselves can be misleading. Burrow is willing to speculate about what gesture might be intended by a particular word, but he is well aware that the problems that attend attempts to study NVC across existing cultures are multiplied in any effort to study the looks and gestures of the past as preserved in texts (180). The author nicely illustrates the ambiguity of NVC with a popular story from the thirteenth-century jurist Accursius, in which a civilized Greek emissary is confronted by a crude Roman. “The Greek holds out his index finger, meaning, as he later explains, that there is but one God; but the Roman takes this to mean ‘I’ll poke your eye out’; and in response he threatens to poke both the Greek’s eyes out and knock his teeth in as well, by holding out two fingers and a thumb. The Greek, however, understands this gesture as a sign of the three Persons of the one God, and is duly impressed.” As Burrow adds, the story “stands as a salutary warning for studies such as the present one” (68). What Gestures and Looks in Medieval Narrative lacks in theoretical depth it makes up in bringing diachronically-aware sense and order to a little-explored subject. VICTORIA SIMMONS, Folklore and Mythology, UCLA Christine Chism, Alliterative Revivals (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2002) 327 pp. Though the title might suggest it, Christine Chism’s Alliterative Revivals is not about revisiting the origins of the fourteenth-century Alliterative Revival in England, though some discussion of this topic necessarily informs her argument . Instead the “revivals” of the title are something much more interesting indeed: revenants returning from the dead to speak to the living. Chism explores the trope of the revenant in a diverse group of Middle English alliterative poems—including St. Erkenwald, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Wars of Alexander, The Siege of Jerusalem, the alliterative Morte Arthure, De Tribus Regibus Mortuis, The Awntyrs off Arthure, and Somer Sunday—to explore their representations of a present that is in a complicated relationship with a past that refuses to lie quiet. It is a heady move, attempting to do for the Alliterative Revival something like what Susan Crane did for insular romance. Chism wants to turn from much scholarship about how and why the Alliterative Revival came about in order to address more interpretive matters. To do so, she must first locate her position with respect to the debates about the origins and purposes of the Alliterative Revival. She tackles this subject in chapter 1, “Alliterative Romance: Improvising Tradition,” where she comes REVIEWS 218 down in favor of Turville-Petre’s arguments for “informed re-creation” (39). Turville-Petre argues that the Alliterative Revival deliberately looks back to Old English, but he does not postulate a direct link between Old English poetry and meter and Middle English alliterative verse. Chism is particularly interested in the deliberate archaizing of Middle English alliterative verse in Turville -Petre’s model—a historical gesture toward the past that fits in well with her own interests in the relationship of the fourteenth-century present to its past. The succeeding chapters are each organized around one or more of the poems listed above—chapter 2 deals with St. Erkenwald, chapter 3 with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, chapter 4 with The Wars of Alexander, chapter 5 with...