The Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages: Reconstructive Polyphony: Essays in Honor of Robert O. Payne ed. by John M. Hill and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi (review)

REVIEWS turn to medieval categories of understanding (‘‘dominion,’’ ‘‘sovereignty ’’) provides an exemplary instance of the nuanced historicism this volume promotes. Fradenburg takes up another medieval category, need. Piers Plowman provides the central text for a rigorous ethical interrogation of medieval and contemporary representations of poverty; a range of theorists, from Lacan and Žižek to Marx, Bataille, and Baudrillard supply the conceptual vocabulary for a deeply felt meditation upon the discursive and material workings of desire and ‘‘needful things.’’ Of critical importance to the ambition of this essay (and indeed to the volume as a whole) is the indispensability of the law as a source both for particular historical evidences and for more general formulations of principle. Thus Fradenburg demonstrates that the category of necessity cannot be causally linked to crime; records show that ‘‘when people take needful things, they do so, quite simply, at all levels of society’’ (p. 64). She concludes that ‘‘the distinction between luxuries and necessities will always be a prelude to the withholding of things in general and of the social agency attendant upon their possession’’ (p. 65). Certainly, not all readers will agree with this statement. But all will find in this essay a mode of thought exemplary for its capacity to hold in productive tension seemingly opposed critical practices—psychoanalysis and Marxism, poststructuralist critique and empiricist research, the literary and the legal. In its refusal to accept what have become entrenched ideological positions in the necessary conflicts over history and historicism that attend any consideration of the past, this essay holds out the utopian possibility of a critical work both ethical and clearsighted , both passional and practical. Maura B. Nolan University of Notre Dame John M. Hill and Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi, eds. The Rhetorical Poetics of the Middle Ages: Reconstructive Polyphony: Essays in Honor of Robert O. Payne. Madison and Teaneck, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 2000. Pp. 304. $52.50. This Denkschrift is a worthy tribute to the scholar and the gentleman it honors. The essays are of a high quality; many of them, considering 555 ................. 8972$$ CH21 11-01-10 12:23:17 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER their brevity, contain prodigious amounts of information; and every one of them clearly emerges from concerns integral to its author’s life and work as a scholar. Thus, for example, William McClellan continues his ongoing, and potentially transformative, study of The Clerk’s Tale; Martin Stevens, his deep fascination with the self-reflexivity of The Canterbury Tales; Ellen Martin, her continuing demonstration of psychoanalytic tropology’s uncanny relevance to Chaucer’s poetry; Gale Sigal, her always stimulating demonstrations of the gender anomalousness of the alba. Not one of the essays is anything less than a fully professional and, at the same time, fully personal engagement with its subject as its author comes to that subject in light of the career of Robert O. Payne. Worthy tribute, indeed. After a memorial to Payne and a lengthy introduction, both by John M. Hill, the book opens with ‘‘Eustache Deschamps’ L’Art de dictier: Just What Kind of Poetics Is It? Or: How Robert O. Payne Launched My Career in Deschamps Studies,’’ by Deborah M. Sinnreich-Levi, who argues that L’Art de dictier is ‘‘the first French poetics which . . . [has] ties to both the vernacular and Latin traditions, which . . . reflect[s] the poetic practice of a certain time and a certain well-recognized poet, but which is also strong in its own traditions: liberal arts, music, popular genres, and therapeutic medicine’’ (p. 42). Then, in ‘‘Chaucer: Beginnings ,’’ Charles W. Owen focuses on The Book of the Duchess in an argument that postulates that Chaucer ‘‘was not afraid to leave behind his failures—[and] [h]e was certainly not interested in repeating successes’’ (p. 46), both postulates I find important and persuasive to understanding Chaucer’s art. In ‘‘The Mystery of the Bed Chamber’; Mnemotechnique and Vision in Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess,’’ Mary Carruthers concludes that The Book of the Duchess is not ‘‘primarily an effort to console a bereaved individual . . . [but] concerns itself with our grief more immediately than with Blanche’s death...