Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II by Lynn Staley (review)

REVIEWS And Neil Cartlidge too, in what is one of the best essays in the collection , highlights, in a cogent dialogue between Sir Gowther and the Latinate clerical culture of demonology that the text itself promotes (‘‘thereof seyes clerkus’’), what romance is not and why that matters. Three other essays exemplify the series’ commitment to promoting lesser-known texts—Hardman on Tristrem and Isoude, Bradbury on Athelston, and Dalrymple on Torrent of Portyngale—all effectively demonstrating the particularities and peculiarities of material that should be at the forefront of the current critical agenda. And, finally, what is the volume’s party piece: Elizabeth Archibald’s lively tour of the provocative absence of baths or any other evidence that courtly lovers ever had a good scrub in English romance. The genre, it seems, offers disappointingly little challenge to modern assumptions about the incivility of the Middle Ages in matters of personal hygiene and underscores the provocative alterity of our own cultural encounter with the medieval past. ‘‘Romance in Medieval England’’ serves an invaluable function in its promotion of texts and traditions, English and Anglo-Norman, that are elsewhere marginalized or ignored, but as it faces its anniversary encounter with its own past, it sits at a crucial juncture. Whether it will embrace the impulse to theorize, whether it will refine its own distinctive approaches to textual scholarship, or whether it will use those approaches to shape and inform what is criticism’s dominant trends remains to be seen. Nicola McDonald University of York Lynn Staley. Languages of Power in the Age of Richard II. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv, 394. $45.00. This is an immensely informative and stimulating guide to a field that Staley essentially defines as well as excavates: the ‘‘languages’’ of argument about royal power and political authority in England c. 1380–99, as deployed especially by Chaucer, Gower, Richard Maidstone, Thomas Usk, and Richard II himself. The book’s central historical argument is also its best: like Nigel Saul (for example, Richard II [New Haven: Yale PAGE 331 331 ................. 16094$ CH17 11-01-10 14:05:22 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER University Press, 1997], pp. 238–39), Staley views Richard and his supporters as responding to the crisis of the ‘‘Merciless Parliament’’ with a self-conscious amplification of his claims to royal power, emphasized in the face of growing evidence of its unacceptability. Staley ingeniously defines this posture as a turn to a ‘‘sacramental’’ mode of kingship, drawn from contemporary French versions of anointed kingship because English traditions did not supply the necessary terms. This strategy was advanced and supported by at least Roger Dimmock and Philippe de Mézières, but it elicited a range of resistance and criticism by many English writers. Richard’s posture was particularly ill-timed not only because of the challenges by the Lords Appellant, but also because of the Wycliffite challenges to ‘‘sacrality’’ as such, which Staley brilliantly generalizes to political as well as religious realms. The corollary to all this is that poets and potentates both realized that language, rhetoric, and imaginative literature were as important politically as direct power. Thus Staley advances a further, more openly speculative treatment of how ‘‘languages’’ of social power might have been shaped by Richard’s disapproving uncles, John of Gaunt and Thomas of Woodstock, especially by means of the Pearl-poems, for which, she proposes, they served as major patrons. Finally, Staley presents a range of French fourteenth-century prose political writings and their English ‘‘responses’’ (or rather, contrasts), which she proposes are all ultimately related to Virgil’s Georgics, the ur-model, in her view, of capacious late medieval economic and household narratives. This book presents a large and absorbing landscape, whose materials and scholarly bases Staley has clearly pondered deeply. The readings of all the materials are sensitive, highly informed critically, and, especially with Chaucer, sometimes brilliantly compelling. Sometimes the details of the textual expositions claim too much attention without enough sharp edges or provable historical connections, or they move too far from key assertions (the tours of the French advice writings near the end of the book seem long; the historical importance...