Magistra Doctissima: Essays in Honor of Bonnie Wheeler ed. by Dorsey Armstrong, Ann W. Astell, Howell Chickering (review)

The diverse range of topics covered in the nineteen essays assembled in this volume speaks to the plurality of interests and approaches championed by Bonnie Wheeler throughout her career. Indeed, as Ann W. Astell and Howell Chickering suggest in their Introduction, magistra is a particularly apt title for Wheeler precisely because it has a broad range of possible meanings: “not only ‘teacher’ but also ‘guide, tutor, expert, mentor, guardian, shepherd, master, chief, instigator, author, and judge,’ depending on the context and date of use” (p. 2). Five contributions, for instance, pay homage to Wheeler’s substantial influence and finesse as an editor by including previously unpublished or untranslated primary sources. What all of the essays ultimately have in common is that they “extend or complement the scholarly work that Bonnie has done in these several fields” (p. 4). Put another way, they reflect Wheeler’s many accomplishments in a handful of her most widely known magisterial roles.

The volume is multidisciplinary in its approach to celebrating both the Middle Ages and, by extension, Wheeler, boasting new scholarship from contributors whose fields of expertise vary considerably. The editors organized the resulting contributions into five more or less balanced sections designed to emulate the primary focal points of Wheeler’s work: “Old and Middle English Literature”; “Arthuriana Then and Now”; “Joan of Arc Then and Now”; “Nuns and Spirituality”; and “Royal Women.” While the bulk of Astell and Chickering’s Introduction contextualizes each essay within a larger narrative of Wheeler’s own scholarship, they are quick to point out that all of the essays are valuable in their own right, opening up new lines of inquiry for the specific texts, authors, or traditions with which they are engaged.

Toshiyuki Takamiya opens the first section by exploring the protectiveness of Grendel’s mother’s in a 1929 poem by the Japanese feminist poet Kiyoko Nagase. Takamiya traces the sympathetic treatment of mothering apparent within Nagase’s poem to her own struggles as a “mother-poet” (p. 21) in pre- and postwar Japan, suggesting a powerful connection between “medieval” and “modern.” Jeffrey Jerome Cohen turns our attention to Chaucer’s canonicity, offering an eloquent reminder of the stakes involved in any attempt to associate Chaucer with England since “an essential component of his Englishness” (p. 25) is his marginalization of the Irish, Scottish, and Welsh. Cohen warns against accepting these historical exclusions at face value, arguing instead for the study of a “postcolonial British Chaucer” as a “complicated character” who is at once “inventive and demeaning” (p. 31). Lorraine Kochanske Stock challenges the common assumption that the old woman with whom Gawain interacts in The Wife of Bath’s Tale is a monstrous hag. Such a designation, Stock suggests, relies more on the reader’s willingness to accept the knight/rapist’s perspective or to superimpose descriptions from other Loathly Lady analogues onto this Tale since the text itself never uses the term “hag” nor offers documentation of the wife’s physical ugliness. Stephen Stallcup focuses on the ambiguous eight-line passage in which Arcite goes from apparent victor to near death toward the end of The Knight’s Tale. Comparing standard editions of Chaucer’s poem with the Teseida, Stallcup concludes that the passage has probably been misread by readers since the fourteenth century before offering stede as a possible emendation for the more common heed in line 2689.

The second section opens with Maurice Keen’s exploration of royal interest in ongoing searches for and supposed discoveries of physical Arthurian remains between 1180 and 1550. Keen contextualizes this interest within the growing discourses of English nationhood and English patriotism. Geoffrey Ashe details the substantial influence of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s characterization of Merlin. Highlighting the originality and intentional obscurity of Geoffrey’s Prophecies, Ashe suggests that Geoffrey’s model of prophesy was immediately influential...