Ritual and the Rood: Liturgical Images and the Old English Poems of the Dream of the Rood Tradition by Éamonn Ó Carragáin (review)

REVIEWS 272 form of exegesis” (140) before demanding that the audience perform interpretation on a significantly higher level. In her own interpretation, she locates a marked movement towards tragedy in Lydgate’s inclusion of Henry V in an otherwise typical catalogue of leaders who “putte Fortune vnder foote” (150)— but still fall victims to contingency, of course, in death. Nolan sums up her textual analysis in this rich and lengthy chapter with the conclusion that “when Lydgate recognized Henry V as a tragic figure—or perhaps, more accurately, when such a recognition become possible—tragedy moved out of the comic fiction of the Canterbury Tales and into the public world of events and their representation” (171). In her final chapter, “Spectacular culture: the Roman triumph,” Nolan addresses Lydgate’s 1432 verses commemorating the entry of the crowned Henry VI into London. Switching to a new method of approaching the text, Nolan considers the shifting signification of the triumph exemplum in the work of Lydgate and several thirteenth and fourteenth century texts, including Gesta Romanorum, Fasciculus Morum, Bromyard’s Summa Praedicantium, Higden’s Polychronicon, and Holcot’s Super Libros Sapientiae. She also links these texts to Lydgate’s Serpent of Division, thereby providing a sense of the overall trajectory of her book’s argument. Her study of these texts yields the conclusion that “Lydgate’s turn to triumph in Serpent of Division and in “Henry VI’s Triumphal Entry” is neither arbitrary nor simple; both uses reflect new ways of thinking about the classical past in relation to the present, and both form part of a complex meditation on the relation between sovereign power and spectacular display” (189). In Lydgate’s struggle to reconcile the “pagan past” of the Roman triumph with the “Christian present” (226), Nolan argues that he recognizes not only its exemplarity, but also its pastness. Lydgate’s ambivalence in his propagandistic use of the triumph, she concludes, is “an historical ambivalence ” (233). The invocation of Caesar glorifies the newly crowned monarch, but it also recalls the threat of division. John Lydgate and the Making of Public Culture breathes new life into scholarly dialogue regarding Lydgate’s literary accomplishment. Nolan’s rich textual analysis, with its wide-ranging consideration of Lydgate’s literary and cultural sources, provides a particularly useful resource to the academic. More discussion of Lydgate’s “public,” often an afterthought in her arguments, would provide a welcome addition to Nolan’s work. Her challenging readings also demand a certain level of familiarity with Lydgate and his oeuvre at the outset, thus diminishing the book’s accessibility to a casual reader. For scholars and readers of Lydgate, however, she has produced an important and insightful reading of some of his more critically neglected works. With a series of thoughtful textual explorations, Nolan makes an intriguing case for Lydgate’s creation of a representative public through social and aesthetic forms. EMILY RUNDE, English, UCLA Éamonn Ó Carragáin, Ritual and the Rood: Liturgical Images and the Old English Poems of the Dream of the Rood Tradition (Toronto: University of Toronto Press 2005) 427 pp., ill. Éamonn Ó Carragáin’s Ritual and the Rood uses the Ruthwell Cross as the image of a particularly Anglo-Saxon Christian theological tradition that is REVIEWS 273 epitomized in the Dream of the Rood. This tradition focuses on the cross of Christ, although only in Anglo-Saxon England is the cross itself a sentient object , in dialogue with the Divinity, rather than just an object of Christian devotion or even sanctification. Ó Carragáin’s work is uncommonly comprehensive for a liturgical study. He includes extensive evidence from art, as well as literary , historical, theological, and liturgical sources. He gleans from sources from the seventh to ninth centuries relating to Latin, Germanic, Celtic, and Byzantine Chrisianity. His work is a model of the interdisciplinary approach that has become dominant in late antique and early medieval Christianity. His interpretation of art and liturgy is theologically and historically informed, an all too often rare quality in early Christian art history. Inevitably, however, many of his conclusions rely on analogy and conjecture, because evidence about AngloSaxon Christianity of the seventh and eight centuries is rather scant. Ó Carrag...