Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England by Fiona Somerset (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER the diversity of theme and description that creates a distinct, discordant polyphony, the greatest contributory factor to the success of the ballades is the use of dialogue and different narrative voices within the poems’’ (p. 173). In Deschamps’s polyphonic compilations, we recognize something of Chaucer’s. Other essays in this collection illustrate how Deschamps broadened the thematic scope of fixed lyric forms. Francesca Canadé Sautman’s ‘‘Eustache Deschamps in the Forest of Folklore’’ helps to map quite various elements of popular or folk culture in the corpus of his verse. Karin Becker treats Deschamps’s medical poetry, noting in her introduction that ‘‘Deschamps’s works are characterized by a general receptiveness to all sorts of pragmatic, extra-literary subjects, text forms, and discourse types’’ (p. 211). Robert Magnan treats a group of about six moralizing poems in which Deschamps reflects on the ‘‘course of life’’ in order to codify behaviors appropriate to each period. Terence Scully’s essay, ‘‘Manger pour vivre: The Gourmet Deschamps,’’ closes the collection on an amusing note by bringing to light one of the ‘‘more or less constant themes in Deschamps’s verse’’ (p. 246). The nearly exhaustive bibliography of editions and criticism of Deschamps ’s works that Deborah Sinnreich-Levi provides at the end of this collection will be very useful (and can be supplemented by the bibliographies in Becker and in Boudet and Millet, mentioned above). Because this bibliography aims to include unpublished dissertations, I would note the omission of my own earliest work on Deschamps, a long chapter entitled ‘‘Eustache Deschamps and the Infant King,’’ pp. 312–426 in my 1978 Columbia dissertation, ‘‘Criticism of the Ruler, 1100–1400, in Provençal, Old French, and Middle English Verse.’’ By giving us a much better idea of the nature and scope of Deschamps’s writing, and by doing it in English, Eustache Deschamps, French CourtierPoet : His Work and His World fills a great need in late medieval studies. Laura Kendrick Université de Versailles Fiona Somerset. Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. ix, 241. $64.95. Recent work on Middle English literature has increasingly addressed the synergy among cultural forces that contributed to the emergence of 592 ................. 8972$$ CH21 11-01-10 12:23:34 PS REVIEWS English as the language of literature and of affairs of state in late medieval England. Much of this research suggests that the emergence of English was the result of local and even highly conscious promotions, English used as a kind of cultural packaging with which writers and interest groups marketed ideological, religious, and political views: Chaucer as the ‘‘father of English poetry’’ strategically promoted by the new Lancastrian dynasty in the years just after his death, in a quest for cultural legitimization, as John Hurt Fisher has argued; the vernacular theologians Rolle, Hilton, and Julian of Norwich writing in English, the language of the laity, in order to promote a new democratizing spirituality , as Nicholas Watson has recently claimed. In the recent Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature, competing uses of various vernacular languages in Britain get a large measure of attention, and indeed can be said to mark this volume’s particular contribution. A new focus on vernacular politics may perhaps be a legacy of New Historicism, which often takes a lateral rather than linear historical view, examining texts and text production as forms of discourse among competing textual communities. In any case, attention to the politics of English usage, or to the use of English as a political or ideological act, has important implications not only for an understanding of medieval textual transmission but also for tracking the uses of English in the world today, where politics and technology have edged English into the standard language of globalized commerce and academic discourse. Clerical Discourse and Lay Audience in Late Medieval England makes a timely contribution to these studies on the emergence of English. Focusing particularly on ‘‘extraclergial’’ writings, texts that position themselves outside of clerical orders as a space from which to critique clerical practices and doctrine, the study examines the ways writers used language , and especially English, to intervene...