Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education, Chaucer, and His Followers by Edward Wheatley (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER much easier to understand why Kempe was harrassed and arrested than why she was acquitted, a surprising triumph of justice that cannot be adequately explained by her quick wits and respectable birth. If Spiritual Economies has any flaw, it is a somewhat rigid polarization of the sexes. Clerics and women in Warren’s narrative are relentlessly at odds, struggling for ownership of a spiritual commodity whose content seems less important than its contestation. But if this story is not the whole truth, there is nonetheless much truth in it. Nancy Warren has given us a thoughtful and truly Machiavellian history of piety. Barbara Newman Northwestern University Edward Wheatley Mastering Aesop: Medieval Education, Chaucer, and His Followers. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2000. Pp. 336. $55.00. Edward Wheatley offers an informative and intriguing two-for-one text: the first three chapters introduce and explore the use of fabula in the curricula of the middle ages, and the second three provide readings of the fables of Chaucer, Lydgate, and Henryson in light of those curricular interests and structures. His scholarly apparatus includes thorough notes and five appendices of texts central to his study of medieval curriculum : Selected Fables from the Elegiac Romulus; Esopus moraliztus cum bono commento, Auctores octo; Fabularum Esopi; an Italian manuscript of fables and their commentaries; and the Accessus to the elegiac Romulus. Wheatley bases his wide-ranging study of the fable and its redactors on an examination of over one hundred manuscripts and incunables and seeks to treat ‘‘the influence of Latin texts and commentaries on vernacular authors, theories of translation, the nature of medieval pedagogical practice, and the study of manuscripts as exemplars of unique, individual readings’’ (vii); in each case his exploration of fable advances our understanding of these larger issues. Wheatley entreats his readers to ‘‘imagine an era during which fable was taken seriously as a vehicle for social, political, and religious communication ’’ (3). His central text is the twelfth-century elegiac Romulus (also known as the Anonymus Neveleti, the fables of Gualterus Anglicus, 442 ................. 9680$$ CH16 11-01-10 12:37:38 PS REVIEWS and the Aesopus moralizatus), a text whose popularity and influence are averred by the more than one hundred seventy extant manuscripts and the more than fifty editions printed in five countries in the fifteenth century alone. Its educational provenance is apparent from its pairing with scholasic commentary and vocabulary glosses, and leads Wheatley to conclude that the fables of the elegiac Romulus and its frequently appended curricular apparatuses—the Romulus Epistle and the accessus and commentaries—would have been read and studied by ‘‘nearly every educated medieval reader’’ (p. 191). Following theorist Jean-Marie Schaeffer in defining fabula—which in the middle ages could also mean ‘‘fiction’’—as ‘‘a set of rhetorical practices ,’’ Wheatley notes, significantly, that fable is a mode of discourse ‘‘that lies as much in the control of the teller as in the inherited narrative per se’’ (p. 5). Pursuing his investigation of auctoritas and the shifting relationships fabulists have to their sources, Wheatley argues that the elegiac Romulus’s association with its dual auctores—the literary Aesop and the imperial Romulus—resulted in a conflicted textual authority echoing the disparate representations of Aesop himself: figurations highlight either his status as trickster and slave or as memorialized literary master. He links these two biographical paths to Rita Copeland’s view of translation as either cultural legacy or appropriation, a duality through which he explores the various relationships medieval fabulists negotiated with their literary master, Aesop, as well as with interim redactors (most thoroughly Marie de France for Lydgate). He examines issues of authority and translation through educational paradigms of the classical period inherited by the middle ages, in order ‘‘to describe and analyze the pedagogical uses and significance of the full range of scholastic practices associated with fable’’ (p. 52). His curricular focus is on the practice of the progymnasmata, wherein students are given a text that they must memorize, paraphrase, expand, and abridge, glossing at every stage. Tracing the practice from Quintillian to Alcuin of York, John of Salisbury, and Vincent of Beauvais, Wheatley argues that the varied practices...