Answerable Style: the Idea of the Literary in Medieval England ed. by Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway (review)

Although not officially termed a festschrift, this collection of essays has something of the same feel about it. Its origins lie in a conference held at Berkeley on the occasion of Anne Middleton’s retirement, and her work remains the touchstone for all the contributors, whether or not they were a part of that original gathering. The range of Middleton’s own work ensures a corresponding breadth of topic and approach in the essays. Andrew Galloway describes her emphasis as falling first on the importance of form, and second on “what may be called a distinctive literary ethics, the ‘good’ of literature” (p. 3). The first of those, in the shape of the New Formalism, has become a major trend in recent modernist criticism, and the book is in no small part offered as a medieval contribution to that. The overarching idea of the whole volume is to investigate what constitutes “the literary” in the Middle Ages and to promote that as an essential part of the corresponding movement in modern and postmodern studies. Such an integration is at least what Galloway urges in his Introduction on “The Medieval Literary,” and few medievalists would disagree: both the practice and the theory of literature in the Middle Ages offer a sophistication that can only strengthen the terms of the debate, quite apart from the fact that what was then being thought and written constitutes a good proportion of the groundwork of later practice and theory. That foundation remains important however one interprets the ambiguity of the subtitle: does the idea of the literary in medieval England refer to our ideas of the literary, or the writers’ own? If the latter, how much does it matter that the term literary had no obvious medieval equivalent even in Latin, let alone Middle English? Without some definition of the term (which is never offered), the contributors are left pretty much to their own devices. The essays offer plenty of individual new insights into methods of composition, sources, affect, and voice, but they do so by insistently returning us to the characteristics of individual texts and to their authors’ ideas and practices of writing. All of them fruitfully developed my own thoughts about their subjects, even when I was not wholly persuaded by some of the details. Whether they add up to a shift in our understanding of the medieval literary is however less clear—though greater coherence could have been achieved only by sacrificing the qualities in the essays that scholars of their particular topics will most appreciate.

The essays are grouped into two sections. The first, “The Literary between Latin and Vernacular,” looks at various intersections of the two cultures of a kind that later scholars might want to define as humanist if they were lodged in any context other than the medieval. Rita Copeland’s opening essay is, as one has come to expect of her work, especially wide in its field of exploration and its implications: she investigates the medieval reception of Horace’s Ars poetica, showing how deeply it became embedded into the writing of accessus, how it was complemented as a classroom text by Geoffrey of Vinsauf’s more user-friendly Poetria nova, and how its consequent release from the classroom allowed a late medieval rebirth as the “poet’s poem and standard of literary judgment” with which we are generally familiar only from later periods. Wendy Scase presents an intriguing argument that the poets of the Piers Plowman tradition modeled their borrowings from Langland on the model of schoolroom exercises in composition and imitation. Katharine Breen likewise links the poem to the classroom, arguing that Anima’s self-naming “is offered in part as a language-learning tool” (p. 99) as well as being a mnemonic guide to doctrine of the Speculum theologiae...