Summa virtutum de remediis anime ed. by Siegfried Wenzel (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER improperia, or of its assignment, in Latin sermon MSS, as a performed dialogue, is to lose touch with the medieval poem almost entirely. Chaucer's Native Hen"tage proposes a romantic aesthetic of lyric natu­ ralism and individual, national genius that Chaucer never dreamed of, let alone practiced. His decision to write in English had a political basis, as it did forJack Straw orJohn Ball, for Archbishop Courtenay opening Parlia­ ment or for Henry Bolingbrook challenging the crown, or forJohn Gower writing and then revising the Confessio. Its chief result was not the reinscription of a single, coherent tradition, but a multiplicity of voices, registers, and dialects, all distinctively English in their pluralism. In defining his subject, Weiss has relied extensively on earlier scholars: Saintsbury, Courthope, Schofield, and other nineteenth-century lumi­ naries are frequently cited. The bibliography at the close of the volume lists, among more than two hundred fifty items, only a handful of publica­ tions from the 1980's, and omits important studies like David L.Jeffrey's volume on the lyrics. This is indeed an old-fashioned book, that presses its case through enthusiasm and intense readings, but scarcely takes notice of the method and substance of critical inquiry during the last half century and more. THOMAS HAHN University of Rochester SIEGFRIED WENZEL, ed. Summa virtutum de remedtis anime. Chaucer Library. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984. Pp. ix, 373. $35.00. Source identification is a very hazardous occupation, as the late E. J. Dobson, for instance, discovered with his disputed claim for the source of Ancrene Wisse (reviewed by Rouse and Wenzel in Speculum 52 (1977)). Nevertheless, a convincingly established source is a matter for jubilation. In this, the thirdvolume of the Chaucer Library, which so far has published Innocent Ill's De misena condicionis humane and Nicholas of Lynn's Kalendarium, we are invited to imagine Chaucer carefully reading, edit­ ing, and abstracting parts of the Summa virtutum de remediis anime for material to furnish the remedza sections of The Parson's Tale. 260 REVIEWS Siegfried Wenzel provides a fully critical edition, accompanied by a facing translation and prefaced with a lucid, informative introduction which develops and augments an earlier paper by him on the same subject (Traditio 27 [1971]). The most important addition here is the inclusion of two more manuscripts-Einsiedeln, Stiftsbibliothek, MS 275, and Worcester, Cathedral Library, MS F.38. Inthe Introduction he outlines the contents of the Summa, sketches its background and literary genre, dis­ cusses its authorship and date, presents parallel passages in it and Chaucer's remedia, describes the manuscripts and their relations, and states the principles on which the edition is based. In this introductory part the section on the background and literary genre of the Summa is perhaps too cursory to cover such an important tradition (cf. F. Broomfield's copious introduction to his edition of Thomas de Chobham's Summa confessorum [1968]). The Summa virtutum de remediis anime, henceforth referred to as Postquam (from the first word of the text), has nine chapters which, though not numbered in the text, are easily identifiable and deal respec­ tively with the virtues in general (1), particular virtues (2), charity (3), meekness and patience (4), obedience (5), fortitude (6), misericordia and pietas (7), abstinence (8), and continence (9). The work is organized on scholastic lines, with definitions and divisions. Nine manuscripts of Post­ quam have so far come to light. In three of these Postquam is preceded by a copy of Peraldus's Summa vitiorum, and in five others it is preceded by a different treatise on the vices, whose first word is Primo, which is clearly an abbreviated revision of Peraldus's Summa vitiorum.Postquam, as Wenzel convincingly argues, was written as a sequel to Primo (pp. 9-11). Both Primo and Postquam are probably the work of the same author, who remains anonymous. There is one tantalizing clue in the treatise on the vices, where an exemplum refers to a rector of the church of Caldecote called Stephen de Bloy and to his brother Robert de Bloy, but their identities are otherwise untraceable. Wenzel suggests that Primo could have been...