Timely Reading: Between Exegesis and Interpretation by Susan Noakes (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER otherness that he had at his disposal? How does he exploit the available material and the metaphorical possibilities of an alternate world? How do contemporary practices, liturgical and otherwise, construing the rela­ tionship of the dead and the living as one of commemoration, inform the literary practice of Dante and others (scholars such as Eugene Vance, Gabrielle M. Spiegel and Patrick Geary have done interesting work on the general subject of commemoration)? Other questions come to mind­ indeed are brought to mind by Morgan's book- but are not addressed.Of course, a book cannot be faulted for not being about something else, but I did have the sense that certain literary and historical questions were crying out for attention and not getting any.A listing of sources, without sufficient commentary on their specific importance or interest, is an all-too-common dissertation sub-genre; when it is made into a book, the study should leave the reader with some sense of why all this is very significant. That is the frustration of this book, but it is certainly not alone in this. And its virtues are equally evident. The volume is wonderfully produced (I could not find a typo), the plates crisp, and the binding of high quality. The author's style is, if not elegant, readable.And, for those who are looking for a book that might have been entitled "Medieval Popular Traditions of the Life After Death," Morgan's research will be extremely useful; it is the Dantists among us who may come away frustrated.Still, it is a book I recommend both to students of Dante and medievalists generally for the wealth of information, texts and scholarship it brings together for the first time and for the questions it presses us to engage, come quei che va di notte, I che porta zi lume dietro e se non giova, I ma dopa sefa lepersone dotte. ... PAUL SPILLENGER Columbia University SUSAN NOAKES. Timely Reading: Between Exegesis and Interpretation. Ithaca, N.Y., andLondon: Cornell University Press, 1988. Pp.xv, 249. $29.95. The basic argument of this book is that "reading is a historically evolving process;" not only does the identity of readers change through generations or centuries, but an individual reader changes through much shorter periods of time. Reading therefore "brings with it a reminder of loss of 224 REVIEWS earlier readersand earlier reading selves," as wellas, paradoxically, thesense of enrichment associated with reading by Western culture. The thesis is presented through analyses and comparisons of five writers, Dante, Boc­ cacio, Christine de Pizan, Nerval, and Baudelaire, with some attention to the historical changes in the circumstances ofreaders and reading from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century. Althoughthe conception ofthe book began with the nineteenth-century material, and the author believes that we are still caught in the "romantic ambivalence about interpretation and the exegetical longing" of scholars, she constructs her argument chronologically and probably wisely leaves its modern theoretical basis to the end. Boccaccio and Baudelaire are pre­ sented as the opposite extremes of the study, Boccaccio the "would-be perfect exegete," Baudelaire the "would-be infinite interpreter," the text being for Boccaccio (in the Genealogie) a dismembered body the able reader can heal, for Baudelaire a body the reader subjects to limitless metamorphosis. Dante and Christine read, and expect their readers to read, combining exegesis and interpretation, while Nerval, who accepts the validity of both, is "shattered by their tensions." Noakes begins with a number of general points, reminding us that reading has not always been the process we are used to, that reading like interpretation in the Middle Ages was frequently a community experience, that the habit of reading aloud would have kept the pace of reading slow, that reading usually began with Latin religious texts and was therefore associated at first with worship, and that machines like the printing press which could transmit a text unaltered gave us the false notion that we could avoid the losses incurred by time. Noakes's point is that it is the reader, not the text, that is responsible for the changes. Dante gives his own example of the temporality of...