A Companion to “The Book of Margery Kempe” ed. by John H. Arnold, Katherine J. Lewis, and: A Companion to Gower ed. by Siân Echard (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER painfully exemplary Cresseid. Again Allen makes helpful points about the mechanics of foisting ‘‘exemplarity’’ upon a narrative, but her conclusion —that Henryson ‘‘pulls the story back from the brink of indeterminacy to reinvest Cresseid with the vivid and emblematic power of an exemplary figure’’ (p. 156)—is not strikingly original. Allen’s False Fables and Exemplary Truth is not as far-reaching or ambitious as Scanlon’s Narrative, Authority, Power, and therefore it may not be as useful to medievalists seeking a fully historicized analytic overview of exemplum as a mode of discourse. However, within its more limited scope, Allen’s book offers insight into the exemplary impulse in fourteenth - and fifteenth-century British literature, and therefore it provides a suitable pendant to Scanlon’s work. Edward Wheatley Loyola University John H. Arnold and Katherine J. Lewis, eds. A Companion to ‘‘The Book of Margery Kempe.’’ Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004. Pp. xxiv, 246. $90.00. Siân Echard, ed. A Companion to Gower. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2004. Pp. x, 286. $110.00. The past decade has seen a striking proliferation of companions and introductory guides. Among the causes for this proliferation one would certainly want to cite such entirely salutary developments as the expansion of the canon and the sharp growth in new approaches combined with the renewal of some older ones. But more worrying ones need to be acknowledged as well: the apparently permanently soft market for scholarly books and the continual economic pressures on academic and scholarly presses. Most of us would be happier in a publishing environment where more of the money currently going into companions and other introductory anthologies was going into monographs. Nevertheless , the profusion of companions offers intellectual benefits of its own. It provides for a consolidation of some of the best and most innovative scholarly work in recent decades, a stocktaking of our now impressively expanded canon, and a concerted means for suggesting the direction of PAGE 276 276 ................. 16094$ CH17 11-01-10 14:04:56 PS REVIEWS future work. These two collections respond mainly to the more positive developments, especially the expanding canon. The current centrality of Margery Kempe constitutes one of feminism’s most notable triumphs in Middle English scholarship, while a critically sophisticated historicism has pried Gower out of his perennial status as Chaucer’s also-ran. These two companions form early contributions to a new initiative by Boydell and Brewer, a cluster of companions on topics from the Ancrene Wisse to the Lancelot-Grail cycle. The publishers do not classify these companions as a separate series, nor was I able to find anything on their web sites regarding the general aims or range of this initiative. The dust jacket to the Kempe Companion explains that its ‘‘authors both survey existing work and present new arguments, insights and ideas,’’ and it seems safe to infer that as the more general goal, with emphasis especially on making original contributions to current scholarship. Both of these read as collections of scholarly essays written mainly for other Middle English scholars. The Gower Companion advertises itself as aimed at ‘‘the advanced undergraduate or graduate student,’’ but it makes no concession even to the most advanced of undergraduates. (Price will be an additional barrier: like all Boydell and Brewer books, these volumes are beautifully, but expensively, produced.) The overview these volumes provide must largely be inferred mainly from the topics of their essays taken as a whole, although Arnold and Lewis mitigate this problem with a Preface and an Afterword. Without sacrificing specialized rigor, this austere approach will provide the novice, given enough persistence, with the general picture of the field that any introduction should offer. But the approach also puts considerable pressure on editorial selection and requires every contribution to make good on the claims to originality . Arnold, Lewis, and their contributors meet these challenges brilliantly , while the results for Echard’s volume are more mixed. A Companion to Gower follows three excellent Gower anthologies edited by R. F. Yeager between 1989 and 1998, and it simply lacks much of their range and daring. Where they concentrated on Gower’s politics, the narrative complexity of...