Amphoteroglossia: A Poetics of the Twelfth-Century Medieval Greek Novel by Panagiotis Roilos (review)

REVIEWS 269 plays “are in fact works in the Piers Plowman tradition that respond to urban theater by staging both the politics and hermeneutics of competing Franciscan, Langlandian, and Wycliffite versions of Christian poverty. In reaction to the York cycle’s celebration of a visible, public, oligarchic exegesis, the Wakefield plays introduce a radical interiority as their site of interpretation” (6). Nisse’s next chapter, “Into Exiled Hands, Jewish Exegesis and Urban Identity in the Croxton Play of the Sacrament,” develops an antiurban context for what she calls this “grotesque anti-Judaic” play performed for a Norwich audience “at once part of an urban economy and wary of its implications for their collective, ‘local’ identity,” while tracing the history of the figure of the “hermeneutic Jew.” The book ends with a chapter entitled “The Mixed Life in Motion: Wisdom ’s Devotional Politics,” an allegory which “demonstrates the dangers of encouraging the English gentry to read and interpret ambiguous language ...,” emphasizing the potential for poor governance which manipulates religious idiom based on “willful” reading. Nisse’s Defining Acts provides a lucid and insightful treatment of late medieval drama; her work will prove most rewarding to the reader who already possesses a thorough knowledge of the English mystery cycles and the Lollard or Wycliffite tradition. Scholars and students who are particularly interested in the oft-neglected fifteenth century will find themselves most engaged by the range and diversity of material that Nisse covers. SARA TORRES, English, UCLA Panagiotis Roilos, Amphoteroglossia: A Poetics of the Twelfth-Century Medieval Greek Novel (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press) 360 pp. Amphoteroglossia (the book) is the type of study that must begin by defining carefully much of its terminology, including amphoteroglossia (the concept). Befitting the author’s dual standing in comparative and classical literature, this book examines the inherent contradiction of the twelfth-century Komnenian novels, that is, how they can be both traditionally Hellenistic and iconoclastically medieval. Roilos believes, too, that this awkward marriage of conservatism and revision spans the literary history of theorized and practiced aesthetics (the book begins with a quotation from Ezra Pound’s The Study in Aesthetics). The complete novels on which this study is built (Rhodanthe and Dosikles, Hysmine and Hysminias, and Drosilla and Charikles) provide a rather convenient practice field for Roilos’s own theories. Within his contextualizing objective , he sets the novels in the twelfth-century intellectual renaissance of writers who rediscovered their ancient Greek heritage and the modernist sensibility of a pliable literary medium. This notion of a “pliable” medium informs much of Roilos’s methodology for his primary objective of analyzing the ars poetica of these novels. Here, definitions are most in order. Roilos builds his argument on three levels of pliability: (1) what he calls “genre modulations,” the plundering of various older literary genres for establishing “the genre of the novel”; (2) historically conscious writers and their referentiality on the “paradigmatic axis” of pagan ancient Greek and later Christian “literary and cultural exempla” and the “syntagmatic axis” of Byzantine “literary and cultural context”; and (3) amphoteroglossia, or “double-tonguedness” or “ambivalence,” that lies behind writers capable of appropriating such conflicting ideologies. Comprehending REVIEWS 270 the parameters of Roilos’s study is a demanding task; many medievalists, one may assume, are unfamiliar with the extant novels in question, and many readers , one may also assume, will find the prolixity of the first chapter challenging. Still, the book is conveniently organized by rhetorical, allegorical, and comic “modulations.” Now if Roilos will only take on the task of translating these twelfth-century literary specimens, hardly any of which, he notes in his preface, are available in English. CHARLES RUSSELL STONE, English, UCLA Alessandro Scafi, Mapping Paradise: A History of Heaven on Earth (Chicago : University of Chicago Press 2006) 398 pp., ill. Mapping Paradise situates the concept of earthly paradise—the biblical Garden of Eden—within the history of Christian thought. Alessandro Scafi defines his project as “a conceptual journey into medieval Christianity” in order to discover “the conditions that made it possible to put paradise on maps” (84). Scafi gives priority to theological and hermeneutical conditions. He shows that medieval world maps are visual representations of the doctrines articulated...