The Book of the Incipit: Beginnings in the Fourteenth Century by D. Vance Smith (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER D. Vance Smith. The Book of the Incipit: Beginnings in the Fourteenth Century. Medieval Cultures 28. Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Pp. 296. $34.95. Smith’s intricately philosophical reading of Piers Plowman contemplates the poem as endlessly beginning again yet struggling to found any originary position, and posits for this a widespread context of medieval concerns—especially in scholastic and ‘‘terminist’’ thought—with the nature of beginning. The study is deliberately nonlinear, generally satisfyingly so, but its utility for further work would be improved if it had a cumulative statement about the late medieval ‘‘problem of beginning’’ that constitutes its novel context for Piers Plowman. I venture the following : in late fourteenth-century England, the general medieval ‘‘problem of beginning’’ finds its purest possible expression—that is, the sense that current existence does not match or faithfully conform to its beginnings is uniquely acute on multiple levels of culture, from the 1381 Rebellion to terminist scholastic treatises. This sense partly derives from doubt about just what beginning is meant for significant action; the possibilities range ‘‘from the beginning of the world itself to the beginning of a text’’ (12), a range of beginnings that, Smith argues, ‘‘cannot really be separated’’ (12) but also cannot shake the sense of their arbitrariness or presentist manipulations (15, 113). The period’s uncertainty about where and how any institution or moral action begins, intensified by a pervasive sense that actions and identities should have authoritative foundations, is complicated by emphases on penance, which supplants extrinsic beginnings of moral action by establishing beginnings for action based on the will alone (34–36, 154–55). This in turn is complicated by doubt about how much human will can establish any kind of beginning, given the originary power of God’s grace and creation (174– 83). The ‘‘merit vs. works’’ debates of the period thus show the ultimate difficulty of locating any kind of beginning needed for moral action, even while the terms of moral action demand some sort of beginning to be defined. Medieval theories of narrative, especially in academic prologues , emphasize that narrative form is predicated on preexisting authorial intention, and also understood to be useful for the subsequent ethical responses of its readers; thus medieval theories of narrative open onto the period’s widespread debates about just what and where beginnings are (for instance, 75–77). All these ‘‘problems’’ of beginning define, for Smith, the explanation 432 ................. 10286$ CH15 11-01-10 13:55:27 PS REVIEWS for and functions of Piers’ unusual literary form, along with a number of its notoriously difficult theological and intellectual issues. The repeated narrative beginnings in Piers, the continual recommencing of dreamvisions (best known from Anne Middleton’s argument that Langland’s poem vastly extrapolates the form, literary authority, and authorial selfportrayal of the opening of the chanson d’avanture [‘‘The Audience and Public of Piers Plowman,’’ in Middle English Alliterative Poetry and its Literary Background, ed. David Lawton (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1983), 102–23]), show the poem’s continual ‘‘nostalgic’’ sense of ‘‘pure beginnings ’’ but also its sense of lacking any foundational power, any moral or theological ability to make a fresh start for ‘‘moral’’ action (not otherwise defined, except as progressing to salvation). The study’s best local results are in the readings of the C.5 ‘‘autobiographical’’ passage, where the narrator’s assertion of making a new beginning is shown to be paradoxical in ethical terms but efficacious in defining the poet’s ‘‘absolute, inextricable relationship with his writing,’’ a vocation ‘‘that can only be justified by its execution—the continuation of the poem’’ (59). Another splendid section is the sustained reading of the ‘‘grammatical analogy,’’ where Smith claims the poem’s focus is on relations between origins and present choices, not on the origins themselves. ‘‘‘Relacoun rect’ is not an absolute affirmation of the value of political and social structure,’’ Smith states—commenting on perhaps the most elusive term in the ‘‘grammatical analogy’’—‘‘but a reminder that social relations, like grammatical relations, are uncertain and have no intrinsic being’’ (164). As with the reading of the ‘‘autobiographical passage,’’ the poem’s sense of...