Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning ed. by Robert M. Stein, Sandra Pierson Prior (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER power.’’ Undoubtedly true. But there seem to be missed opportunities of discussing writers’ evident debates with one another, using the notinsubstantial evidence of their intertextual citations for what those might imply about their interactions on the matters of royal and religious authority. Yet this study presents a magisterial tour of late fourteenth century literature written within the ambit of the royal court, approached through a fascinating new paradigm for the period’s political and religious tensions. Staley displays a capacity to move deftly from the details of literary form and plot and of intricate political and aristocratic history to a compelling thematic or modal level of ‘‘sacrality’’ and its antithesis (contractualism?). This constitutes a major and original synthesis of the entire Ricardian period, and also of our own last decade’s most important scholarly approaches to this material. On the later claims of Gaunt’s and Woodstock’s uses of the Pearlpoet to define their prestige and power and advice to the king, readers will have to decide for themselves, since Staley is explicitly speculative. The argument is interesting and the circumstantial evidence edifying. It is a stretch, perhaps a good one, to imagine the Pearl as Woodstock’s living daughter passed in infancy to a London house of Franciscan Minoresses . It is also intriguing to consider Staley’s portrayal of Woodstock as ‘‘a cultured and intelligent man’’ who would immediately appreciate the ironies in Sir Gawain (p. 222), against Froissart’s depiction of an intemperate warmonger who despises the ‘‘smooth and flowery language ’’ that the French use in negotiations. Staley, however, is aware of such contemporary images (see, for example, page 219), providing there, as throughout, a well-founded provocation for further extensions of this many-sided, continually instructive, and certainly enduring project. Andrew Galloway Cornell University Robert M. Stein and Sandra Pierson Prior, eds. Reading Medieval Culture: Essays in Honor of Robert W. Hanning. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005. Pp. xii, 505. $37.50. Twenty of Robert W. Hanning’s friends, students, colleagues, and associates (many of whom fall into more than one of these categories) have PAGE 334 334 ................. 16094$ CH17 11-01-10 14:05:23 PS REVIEWS written essays for this impressive collection covering literature from the early Middle Ages through the Renaissance. Given the long historical range of this anthology, the editors are to be commended for organizing the commissions into coherent groupings that also provide honorific signposts to some of the primary fields Professor Hanning has cultivated in his own academic career, namely, ‘‘The Place of History and the Time of Romance,’’ ‘‘Chaucer’s Texts and Chaucer’s Readers,’’ and ‘‘Italian Contexts.’’ Moreover, in the Introduction, the editors further explain the volume’s relevance to Robert Hanning’s work by spending time outlining the ways in which the essays depend upon, or allude to, their honoree’s writings. In short, one of the most remarkable virtues of this collection is the seriousness with which the editors have engaged in their task of delivering to readers a volume that makes sense. The essays in the section entitled ‘‘Chaucer’s Texts and Chaucer’s Readers’’ are the ones most relevant to the interests of subscribers to this journal, so in this review I will concentrate on those, beginning with Peter Travis’s ‘‘The Body of the Nun’s Priest, or, Chaucer’s Disseminal Genius.’’ Travis argues that Harry Bailly’s focus on the male sexuality of the Monk and the Nun’s Priest gives Chaucer a chance to enter the twelfth-and thirteenth-century debates about whether or not language, especially in its stylistic registers, is ‘‘effeminate’’ and in need of a ‘‘masculine semiotics’’ (p. 241), symbolized often by the figure of Genius, to rescue it from shifting, destabilizing ‘‘feminine’’ influences. Chaucer, as Travis argues, does not actually take a strong position on this issue, choosing instead simply to diagnose the problem that his forebears saw and then to play with its implications in the language surrounding his sexy, but presumably celibate, Nun’s Priest. In another essay taking gender as its subject, ‘‘ ‘Raptus’ and the Poetics of Married Love in Chaucer’s Wife of...