Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers ed. by Laurie A. Finke, Martin B. Schichtman (review)

REVIEWS ofhighly original inquiry. Some ofthe essaysmainlyinstruct, others mainly argue. Oftheformer, Brewer's, on TheReeve's Tale, for example, must have made a splendid lecture, while of the latter, Boitani's closely reasoned 56page mini-monograph particularly, while impossible to imagine absorbing aurally, presents important new research. There is much to profit by here, though it must be said that the volume is marred by more than a dozen annoying misprints and punctuation errors. JOHN BUGGE Emory University LAURIE A. FINKE and MARTIN B. SCHICHTMAN, eds. Medieval Texts and Contemporary Readers. Ithaca, N.Y., and London: Cornell University Press, 1987. Pp. ix, 264. $29.95 cloth, $12.95 paper. The baker's dozen of essays in this collection covers a variety of English and Continental European works not customarily considered within the covers of a single volume. This cross-Channel representation is most welcome and, perhaps more than any other single feature of the book, heralds the editors' determination to bring Anglo-American trained medievalists into fruitful rapprochement with postmodern Continental literary theory, whose chiefarchitects have had their base, when it has been in literature at all, in the literatures of Europe exclusive of England. Though medievalists have long paid homage to the international quality of medieval literature, including that in English, the traditional structure of many university departments, and the long emphasisboth on the historical developmentof the variousvernacularsand on minute attention to particular texts have too often combined in the past effectively to insulate the study of English medieval literature. After an introductory essay by the editors, which sets out the volume's goals and method of organization, the twelve contributors address a range of material, often from more than one vernacular literature. Thus Robert Hanning writes about glossing as "textual harassment" in some twelfth­ century French texts and in Chaucer, Martin Schichtman about the figure of Gawain in Wace and in Layamon, Peter Travis about the "affective" performance nature of medieval drama both in Latin and in English, and Alain Renoir about expectations engendered by "Oral-Formulaic Rhetoric" 221 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER in a wide variety of Germanic and romance literature composed before the twelfth century. In addition, RachelJacoffwrites about "Models of Literary Influence in the Commedia," Marina Scordilis Brownlee writes on the Spanish misogynistic satire Corbacho, and Sheila Delany criticizes Christine de Pizan as a medieval Phyllis Schlafly. Two contributors discuss Latin works that are not usually considered to be amenable to literary analysis: AlexandreLeupin takeson thePoetria nova of Geoffroi de Vinsauf (the French spelling is deliberate) and Louis Mackey Anselm's Proslogium (so is the Latinized). The three remaining essays are on English subjects, one by Laurie Finke on Piers Plowman and two on Chaucer-Marshall Leicester on "Texmality and Deconstruction" in Troilus and Chaucer's two tales, and Peggy Knapp on the Wife of Bath as a glossator. Though I have grouped them by nationality, that is by no means the principle of organization which the editors adopted. They employ a three­ fold structure, "Textuality, Intertextuality, and the Reader," which "re­ flect[s] what we consider three important emphases of contemporary criti­ cal thought" (p. )): deconstruction, new historicism, and reception theory. In focusing on these main currents in theory, they want "to disclose the underlying assumptions of the three basic concerns of traditional medieval scholarship: textual study, source study, and the historical situation of the reader in the Middle Ages" (p. '.>). They complain about the "modernist bias" ofpostmodern theorists but at the same time begin their book with a fictional caricature from David Lodge's novel Small World, the academic medievalist-as-dusty-philologist Liam McCreedy, claiming thesatire "is not without some justification," for "many medievalists have found contempo­ rary theory a strange and threatening field." The editors have set out to tame the threat and invited essays which will "bring together the Liam McCreedys ofour profession" and "initiate a dialogue between the skeptical and the converted" (pp. vii-viii). If their aim was to soothe, they have succeeded all too well, I think. The essays in the volume are of uniformly high quality, and all are exemplary explorations of interesting problemsconnected with the study of the text(s) which the authors...