Essays on Medieval Literature by J. A. Burrow (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER The literal English translation of the quotations is therefore welcome (the rendering of damoiseaus by "gentleman," p. 92, is not felicitous). Let us note that B. A. Windeatt (Chaucer's Dream Poetry: Sources and Ana­ logues, 1982) gives translated extracts from Remede, Behaingne, Lyon, and Fonteinne. Brownlee confines his examination to the long dits: we sometimes miss some comparison with other poems (e.g., literature as metaphor: L'Alerion but also the Marguerite poetry). The proofreading of dense pages packed with brackets and inverted commas proves to be as meticulous as the writing. There are very few misprints: one must read renewed, p. 38, line 8; non, p. 81, line 23; rebeloient (?), p. 243, line 10; parole, p. 246, line 26; Gourmont, p. 259, line 20; insert bracket, p. 77, line 2; insert comma, p. 89, line 10. The bibliography does not list any work published after 1978-hence the absence of P.-Y. Badel, Le Roman de la Rose au XIVe siecle, 1980: the excitement ofJean de Meun plowing along (pp. 52-54) is not dissimilar from that of Machaut, or of Chaucer. ANDRE CREPIN Universite de Paris-Sorbonne J. A. BURROW. Essays on MedievalLiterature. New York: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1984. Pp. vi, 218. .£17.50, $29.95. This volume of collected essays on English medieval literature contains twelve pieces, eight ofthem reprints ofitems which appeared in a number ofscholarly journals in the period from 1957 to 1981 and four ofthem new articles. The studiespresented byJohn Burrow cover a wide range oftopics (authorial self-representation, the ages ofman, allegory) and a good many works (the Rawlinson lyrics, Piers Plowman, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, The Canterbury Tales, The Cloud of Unknowing) and authors (Langland, Chaucer, Gower, Henryson) from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. In view of this diversity and the fact that the collection reflects almost a lifetime-that is, at least a medieval one-ofscholarly interest in the literature ofthat period, the reviewer is somewhat in a quandary about what approach to take to do justice to the oeuvre he is to discuss. Should he follow the leads given by the author, who distributes his material into four categories: four essays clarifying the meaning of particular poems by explaining concepts or institutions which are more or less unfamiliar 170 REVIEWS nowadays; two essays on The Canterbury Tales; two essays primarily concerned with questions of style; and four essays covering various topics such as "the importance of context, the medieval poet's presentation of himself, the 'nature ideal' in thinking about the ages of man, and the integrity of the literal level in allegories" (p. iii)? This would entail a discussion of at least one representative piece from each of the four categories, if not of almost every item in them, since both the first and the last categories by their very definition contain multifarious material. Such a presentation would obviously become very diffuse. Or should he dispense with the discussion of the individual essays altogether, concentrating instead on common features ofJohn Burrow's approach to and treatment of the subjects he has investigated? The dangers of this method are equally obvious: it tends to smooth out nuances and to create homogeneity. Fully aware of these pitfalls, I have still chosen the second approach. In reading these essays, one quickly notices the presuppositions under­ lying Burrow's assessment of literature: poetry is defined and determined by its form, context, and the reader's expectation, whether this literature is the anonymous poems of MS Rawlinson D.913, which in the absence of an external context provide an internal one for the individual pieces enabling us to decipher their meaning; or the arrangement of the second vision in PiersPlowman (passus 5-7) with its sermon-confession-pilgrimage-pardon sequence developed on the basis of the principle of substitution; or the structure of allegory, which has to satisfy the expectation it arouses (by interpenetrating with its signification, or quadrating with it, or doing neither); or the disposition of the constituent parts ofHenryson's fable The Preaching ofthe Swallow, all unified by the theme of prudence. Conse­ quently, Burrow's analysis will concentrate on...