The Defective Version of Mandeville’s Travels ed. by M. C. Seymour (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER principle and not as a theme, directing it instead to more specific historicist , feminist, or other political claims. But that is much different than ignoring the principle altogether, and the difference is crucial. In contrast to De Man and some of his students, such Chaucerians decided they could have their deconstruction and their history (or politics) too. Scala, whose structural explorations all come to rest on the notion of absence as if it were medieval narrative’s universal theme, clearly would like to return to deconstruction in its purer, more ahistorical form. That is certainly her prerogative. But to proceed as if she were offering Middle English studies a form of argument it has never seen before is simply self-defeating. In the final two chapters, on Gower and Malory, the book’s defects overwhelm its virtues. The Gower chapter begins by claiming that Gower scholarship remains fixated on the figure of the ‘‘moral Gower,’’ thus ignoring much of the best recent Gower criticism. The final chapter , ‘‘The Death of the Arthur’’ [sic] reads Malory’s text as a prefiguration of Roland Barthes’s argument in ‘‘The Death of the Author.’’ Unfortunately throughout this chapter, Scala conflates Barthes’s essay with Michel Foucault’s ‘‘What is an Author?’’ as if the two were making the same argument. This misconception is a common one, but that does not make it any less excusable in a book whose main selling point is its expertise in theory. Moreover, Foucault’s response to Barthes includes a rebuke to those who ‘‘imagine writing as absence’’ (‘‘What is an Author ?’’ in Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism, ed. Josué V. Harari, p. 145). Foucault demands that theory return to the contingencies of history. Reading past such demands does not elude them. Larry Scanlon Rutgers University M. C. Seymour, ed. The Defective Version of Mandeville’s Travels. Early English Text Society, o.s. 319. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xxx, 234. $74.00. Few medieval books were as widely circulated as Mandeville’s Travels (c. 1356). Composed in French, the book was soon translated into eleven PAGE 426 426 .......................... 10906$ CH11 11-01-10 13:59:53 PS REVIEWS other languages. Some three hundred manuscripts are still extant, mostly in English, French, and German. Study of this textual legacy is still incomplete, but the main outlines are clear enough. The French copies comprise three versions, one of which, Insular, served as the ultimate source for the work’s extra-Continental transformations: four main English versions—Bodley, Cotton, Defective, and Egerton—two English verse redactions, four Latin renderings, plus an Irish and a Welsh. Of these, Cotton is the closest translation and Defective the most widely copied (some thirty-nine manuscripts are extant) and the only noncontinental version printed until 1725. The greatest difficulty facing anyone interested in this rich Insular tradition has been the availability of scholarly editions of Insular and Defective. Insular did not appear in a full critical edition until 2000 (Jean de Mandeville, Le Livre des merveilles du monde, ed. Christiane Deluz), unfortunately too late for M. C. Seymour, the reigning authority on the English manuscripts, to use. Defective has before now never been critically edited. First projected some four decades ago, Seymour’s edition ‘‘was scheduled to appear in 1983.’’ A mishap in 1981, however, led to its ‘‘disappearance ,’’ and the edition—‘‘the third . . . in the projected [EETS] series of four English editions’’—had to be reconstructed, making it ‘‘as it were . . . a second edition’’ (p. vii). As a second edition, it was hardly worth waiting for, but as a first it will pass muster. Besides its Introduction , the volume contains ‘‘a substantial (but not linguistic) reconstruction of the archetype of the extant [Defective] manuscripts’’ (p. xxx), plus commentary, textual commentary, an appendix of extracts from the Defective manuscripts, a brief glossary, and two indexes (persons and peoples, and places). The Introduction briefly places Defective and its witnesses in their mandevillean context before explaining how the manuscripts and one important printing (Richard Pynson’s [?1496] editio princeps) are affiliated . A translation of Insular marked by minor omissions, Defective is distinguished above all by a lacuna...