The Bible in Middle English Literature by David C. Fowler (review)

REVIEWS this source, will not be helped by such references as those to "Shirley's MS Add. 16165" without any guidance about where it can be found. In such respects this book falls short ofthe usefulness one might hope for in a work that will serve as a standard reference book for many. There are also occasional errors offact. It is not the case that Peter Idley's Instructions to His Son is a "Renaissance" didactic work (p. 75). Nor is The Life ofOur Lady unfinished (p. 136). Nor is The Siege ofThebes written in stanzas (p. 17). The most disappointing section of the book is the concluding one on Lydgate's "Achievement and Impact," which does not go very far beyond Schirmer's account ofhis reputation. Rather more could have been done to indicate the nature and range of the Lydgate tradition in the sustained influence ofsuch works as The Troy Book and The FallofPrinces down to the end of the sixteenth century, by the evidence of study of his religious poems in the following century, by the importance ofhis mummings, and by his pervasive stylistic and metrical presence in writings of the later fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. While this book is often a helpful introduction to Lydgate, it is not one that will assist the advanced student. And in some respects it may mislead the novice. A. S. G. EDWARDS University of Victoria DAVID C. FOWLER. The Bible in Middle English Literature. Seattle and London: University ofWashington Press, 1984. Pp. xiii, 326. $25.00. The title ofthis book obviously proposes a range ofpossibilities which the author might elect to explore and which the reader might legitimately expect to meet. The publisher assures us that the book will be of value to scholars and students of medieval literature and religion and to general readers with an interest in the ways in which the Bible has influenced vernacular literature. This is a very large claim andone by which any author might find himself severely tested. Fowler spells out the details of this design in his introduction and at once makes it clear that the book has a variety ofconcerns whereby, in two areas, the drama and the lyric, specific issues are designed to be counterpointed against the reader's notional 185 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER expectations of the genre and, in others, Chaucer's Parliament, the Pearl poet (minus Sir Gawain) and Piers Plowman, there are particular inter­ pretative challenges which the poems offer to the reader and which the author proposes to explore and clarify. In all ofthisPiersPlowman is placed "deliberately in a climactic position" as "the most profound example of a work written in imitation of the Bible." It is an undertaking filled with promise and centrally close to the concerns of contemporary studies, and, as is proper to a book which makes large claims, it is not surprising that we at once discover that it handles its material with a voice ofauthority and a firm intention to set the discipline to rights. In the light ofthis stated design I confess that I find the book a puzzling one, and I am not at all sure which part of the broad spectrum of the postulated audience can be expected to profit from its discussions. Perhaps it will be the general reader and students not too far advanced in their studies, since, for these, the book offers a useful and enthusiastic account of central parts of the corpus. The drama chapter, in particular, will be helpful in introducing them to the Cornish cycle and to the Latin drama and will offer them some interesting incidental judgments and charac­ terizations of other cycle plays and of the moralities. The chapter devoted to the lyric is structured to set the poems within the context, and study them as components, of the church calendar both as temporale and sanctorale. The result is an interesting miscellany of information and judgments, butone must sometimes search hard for the Bible, certainly for the text ofthe Bible as integral to the poems. The Chaucer chapter offers a study ofthe Parliament. Here such readers will meet, perhaps for the first time, Ambrose's Hexameron...