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REVIEWS JESSE M. GELLRICH. The Idea ofthe Book in the Middle Ages: Language Theory, Mythology, and Fiction. Ithaca and London: Cornell Univer­ sity Press, 1985. Pp. 292. $27.50. Gellrich's elegant study draws, with remarkable cogency, a line between texts amenable to Robertson's "historical criticism" ("medieval" texts, ac­ cording to Gellrich's parlance) and nonmedieval texts, i.e., "fictions." To arrive at this distinction, he does not rely on the dichotomy "full/devoid of spiritual meaning," as Robenson and his successors have done; rather, he allocates the texts discussed to the medieval or nonmedieval tradition by assessing the methods of ordering, the forms of thinking according to which these works are organized. He argues that medieval culture con­ stitutes one single Book, the cultural Text, and individual medieval texts are defined as copies, by their structure, of this general cultural Text (cf. p. 20). Thus individual literary works of the Middle Ages are not more, but surely not less either, than footnotes to the general Text, telling their readers nothing new but recalling the structure of the Text, parspro toto. Gellrich's typological use of the term "medieval" follows very closely the methodological guidelines for the description of cultures, or world views, as they have been developed and laid down in a series of ankles by Ju. M. Lotman and his team at Turtu since 1966.1 Both Gellrich and Lotman interpret "culture" as "the generator of structuredness,"2 and in a shared semiotic approach both insist that the concept "text" should be applied to any carrier of meaning; accordingly, Gellrich discusses, among others, manuscript painting, architecture, music, and-in an admirable chapter (pp. 94-138)-the medieval meta-language of grammar, as "cultural forms" (p. 20) ofthe Text (Lotman calls them "codes"). Strangely, none of Lotman's anicles is listed in Gellrich's bibliography (nor does he mention A.]. Gurevich's Categories ofMedieval Culture,3 with which his book shares a number of assumptions too). One cannot help regretting that Gellrich must have spent a considerable amount of time in 1 To name afew:Jurij M. I.otman, "Problemsin theTypology ofCulture" [1967],inDaniel Peri Lucid, ed., Soviet Semiotics: An Anthology (Baltimore, Md.:Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977), pp. 213-21; Jurij M. Lorman, "The Sign Mechanism of Culture" [1973], Semiotica 12 (1974):301-305;Jurij M. Lotman, B. A. Uspenskij, V. V. Ivanov, V. N. Toporov, and A. M. Pjatigorskij, Theses on the Semiotic Study ofCulture [1973], Pc!R Press Publica­ tions in Semiotics of Culture, vol. 2 (Lisse, 1975). 2 Jurij M. I.otman and B. A. Uspenskij,"On the Semiotic Mechanism ofCulture" [1971]," NLH9 (1977-78):211-32; this quotation is on p. 213. Similarly, Gellrich, p. 18. 3 Aaron J. Gurevich, Categon·es ofMedieval Culture [1972] (London: RKP, 1985); Ger­ man translation in 1978 (Dresden: Verlag der Kunst). 147 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER repeating work already done elsewhere when, instead, he could have refined his Soviet colleagues' categories and when he could have linked his typological description with "chronometry"-a desideratum mentioned several times by Gellrich (e.g., pp. 18, 30, 252-53) but never tackled. What Gellrich offers in excess of Lotman et al. is a highly pertinent application of Derrida's insights when he comes to his reconstruction of the medieval author's feelings when writing a book (a footnote, that is; cf. pp. 31-35). Gellrich imagines his medieval author to suffer from a sense of insufficiency, since this author must have seen that writing and reading, i.e., post-lapsarian "discourse," as time-consuming affairs, made merely imperfect copies of the timeless Text, of the Divine Book of Nature/ Scripture. As late as 1667, Milton provides a perfect example of this mood (Paradise Lost 7.176-79): Immediate are the acts of God, more swift Than time or motion, but to human ears Cannot without process ofspeech be told, So told as earthly notion can receive. Gellrich concludes from this "psychological" reconstruction that, as long as the idea of the timeless Book/Text was able to cast its shadow of "un-reality" over individually written works, medieval texts were being produced. But when authors began to be dissatisfied...

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