Medieval Readers and Writers, 1350–1400 by Janet Coleman (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER love. Lydgate witnesses to part of this in a passage Burnley quotes from "Complaynt of a Loveres Lyfe ": "And whoso that shal writen of dis­ tresse I In party nedeth to know felyngly I Cause and rote of al such malady" (lines 187-89). To "know feelingly," I suspect, is the heart of Chaucer's inquiry into love,"gentilesse," prudence,saintliness,or whatever interests him.Burn­ ley turns from such a Chaucer to a poet who inquires less than he judges and who plays the moral ironist in a surprisingly low style (surely he would have wanted to move as well as instruct his audience).Feeling enters only in the aridly scholastic context of perceptual psychology: that one must have some softness of heart to perceive anything other than one's own fancies. Yet it is in understanding the subtle relationships between truth telling and feeling that Chaucer proves preeminently a philosopher.If we seek a philosophical Chaucer,we need to go beyond Burnley's focus.We need to leave the prosaic enclosures of moral philosophy and enter the worlds in which Chaucer explores how our subjectivity either enhances or cripples our understanding of truth-thereby affecting the quality of truth telling for narrator after narrator as well as teller after teller. JOHN M.HILL U.S. Naval Academy JANET COLEMAN,Medieval Readers and Writers, 1350-1400. New York: Columbia University Press,1981.Pp.337.$27.SO. In a personal aside in his translation of Ranuph Higden's Polychronicon (ca.1327),John Trevisa updates Higden's earlier remark concerning the ubiquity of French in the schools,saying,"...in alle )Je gramere scoles of Engelonde,chilren leue)J Frensche and construe)J and lerne)J an Englische ...now children of gramer scole conne)J na more Frensche pan can hir lift heele." The change in the tutelage in the classroom mirrors the rapid change elsewhere in this society and marks a first movement away from the basic assumptions of the late Middle Ages concerning the efficacy of Latin for the literate man.This vernacular tuition also underlines the growth of a nascent English middle class,a class that was later to raise its voice against 160 REVIEWS Richard's absolutist policies and his war against the French. The classroom pedagogy that both Higden and Trevisa thought worthy of comment contributed to the demise ofthat fundamental assumption ofthe Middle Ages that authority was not only beneficent but divinely appointed and hence demanded our obedience. Tuition in the native tongue exercised an influence on such disparate phenomena as the Wyclifite challenge to lawful dominion, the growth of an urban mercantile class, the cry for scripture in English, and the increased use of English in all areas of government. The substitution of English for French or Latin in the class­ room, although perhaps only a smaH part ofthe tumultuous social mosaic of the second half of the fourteenth century, is a potent symbol of the general collapse of traditional authority in the half ceµtury between 1350 and 1400, a collapse culminating in Richard's execution. The literature ofthis age was, "like the society that it reflected and that patronized it, experiencing transition" (p. 280). With these words Janet Coleman states in a general way her belief that the turmoil of the society gave way to an equally tumultuous literature, a literature characterized by "the unstable genres and the shifting narrative focus of many of the long and didactic poems" (p. 280). It is Coleman's thesis that only by re­ establishing the nonliterary context ofthe age can we adequately grasp the meaning ofthese poems. To such an end, she traces the social upheaval and the age's literary oeuvre in four major chapters: vernacular literacy and lay education; the literature of social unrest; memory, preaching, and the literature ofa society in transition; and theology, nonscholastic literature, and poetry. Her first chapter examines the reading habits ofthe aristocracy and the "middle classes"; through an inventory ofextant wills she is able to discern something of the literary taste of both groups. Her most striking conclusion is that the difference between the aristocratic courtier and the petit bourgeois was no...