Middle English Debate Poetry: A Critical Anthology ed. by John W. Conlee. (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER impact ofvernacular literary practice, and no real frame is provided for the essays that follow. The introduction ends with a sketchy list of "major medieval my­ thographers" and ten pages of bibliography. Each succeeding essay has its own appended bibliography, and the book concludes with a twenty-five­ page bibliography that includes, as far as I can see, all the works already cited and nothing else. The bibliographies take up more than sixty pages, or about 20 percent ofthe book, and there seems to have been no attempt to impose a system, or even eliminate an overlap that causes some works to be listed five or six times. The result is a book that could be forty pages shorter and one that, despite the coherence promised by the title, will be read for its disiecta membra. WINTHROP WETHERBEE Cornell University JOHN W CONLEE, ed. Middle English Debate Poetry: A Critical An­ thology . East Lansing, Mich.: Colleagues Press, 1991. Pp. xliv, 329. $38.00 cloth, $16.95 paper. Of the literary genres most dear to the Middle Ages, none has been more generally acknowledged yet, at the same time, morepractically unavailable to modern readers than debate poetry. Admittedly, select exemplars like The Owl and the Nightingale and Chaucer's Parlement ofFoules have been often printed and much celebrated. Nevertheless, largely estranged as these poems have been from their esoteric literary contexts, many of their essential qualities have gone unnoticed and unappreciated. Thus, while sensibly deciding to exclude such canonical works from his scholarly an­ thology, John Conlee has in some ways given the general medievalist even these masterworks for the first time, by beginning to reconstitute the specific genre in which they take their fullest meaning. Such a collection is long overdue, and one can only hope that it and Michel-Andre Bossy's continentally-focused Medieval Debate Poetry: Vernacular Wbrks (1987) will soon be complemented by a critical anthology gathering (and translat­ ing) some of the many Latin poems central to the tradition. Conlee's selection of Middle English texts is judicious and generous, running to twenty-four items. Debate poets were among the most gener108 REVIEWS ically sensitive and inventive of medieval authors, and Conlee provides sufficient examples from most of the identifiable debate subgenres to suggest the evolution and manipulation of traditions involved. Represent­ ing "Body and Soul" poems are two early invective monologues by the soul ("The Grave" and "Nou is mon hol and soint"), two later dialogues between flesh and spirit ("In a )Jestri stude I stod" and "Als I lay in a winteris nyt"), and the gruesomely charming "Disputation between the Body and Worms." An appropriate 100 pages go to the three major alliterative debates, "Winner and Waster," "The Parliament of the Three Ages," and "Death andLife." And of the "Didactic and Satiric Disputations" available, Conlee opts for a good balance of doctrinal and secular concern, resolution and ambivalence, seriousness and whimsy; included are ''.Jesus and the Masters of the Laws of theJews," "A Disputation between a Christian and aJew," "A Dialogue between the Part Sensitive and the Part Intellective," "The De­ bate between Mercy and Righteousness," "Mede & moche thank" (Courtier versus Soldier), "The Debate between Nurture and Kynd," and the curious and arguably feminist "Debate of the Carpenter's Tools." Of the extant "Bird Debates" we are given "The Thrush and the Night­ ingale," Clanvowe's "Cuckoo and the Nightingale," "The Clerk and the Nightingale I & II" (Conlee contending that both fragments derive from a single original), "The Merle and the Nightingale," and "A Parliament of Birds." Carrying on the "gender debate" and filling out the selection are four "Middle English Pastourelles": the Harley "Meeting in the Wood," "As I stod on a day," "Throughe a forest as I can ryde," and the bawdy Middle Scots "Adventure on a Wednesday." If any subgenres are missing from the collection, they are the "demonic debates" (related to the aforementioned "Christian and Jew" and boasting intriguing pieces like the quasi­ pastourelle "Inter Diabolus et Virgo" and the witty "Parliament of Devils") and the "debates" related to courtly games, such as the "Holly and Ivy" carols and "The Floure and theLeafe."Another work one...