Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380–1530 ed. by Lee Patterson (review)

REVIEWS Christine treats reading as a game, a subtle game like chess, which she encourages her readers to play to strengthen their souls. Christine puts her ancientmaterial together with no concern for its originalorder, but only for its contemporary significance. (One could make a similar point about the historicity of the stories in the Cite des dames.) Unlike Boccaccio, who was uncomfortable with a multiplicity of interpretation, Christine welcomes it. Her allegories consist of considering a moral problem in the present or a story from the past in relation to the future, a reading process whose results can only be relative. W hat Christine does, and what she teaches her readers to do, can be practiced only by those who are aware that their readings are provisional, that the text will have a life and readers after them. After chapters on Nerval, who projects himself as reader unable to distinguish dream from life or past from present, and Baudelaire, for whom reading is an activity in which two hostile parties face and stare past each other at their own fantasies, Noakes concludes with a theoretical discussion of interpretation based on C. S. Peirce and Emilio Betti, with sections on deconstruction, phenomenology, and new hermeneutics. She notes the discrepancy between the timelessness that Western culture at­ tributes to reading of its major texts and the timeliness that kept them alive, pointing out that the Aeneid survived in the Middle Ages not because it was "timeless" but, on the contrary, because it was made "timely" through Christian interpretation. JOAN M. FERRANTE Columbia University LEE PATTERSON, ed. Literary Practice and Social Change in Britain, 1380-1530. The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics, vol. 8. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1990. Pp. vi, 345. $38.00. This is an outstanding collection of essays that should be studied by anyone concerned with late medieval and early modern culture. Its sustained and exceptional intellectual quality, its fusion of theoreticalsophisticationwith a serious commitment to historical knowledge and its genuinely explora­ tory nature make it not only a very important book formedieval studies but a great pleasure to read. Like Lee Patterson's earlier Negotiating the Past, 227 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER this book will make a powerful contribution to ending the strangely complacent and intellectually deadening conservative pieties for which medieval literary studies since the war have been most notable. A review limited to 1,200 words cannot enter into dialogue with the contributors of this cornucopia; the most it can hope to do is give some indication of the works' themes. The first chapter is "Authorial Signature and Social Identity in Late Fourteenth-Century England," by Anne Mid­ dleton. This long essay must be one of the most brilliant ever written on an English work of the late Middle Ages. It explores the developments of Langland's signatures across the three versions of Piers Plowman, disclosing the profound meanings in these developments by aligning literary forms, social practices, and the events of 1381. The essay's immense scholarship is used to establish the specificity of the links between self and community, whether orthodox or dissenting, in a period experiencing a "crisis" concern­ ing representation itself, "a crisis more fundamentally political than liter­ ary." Not only is her essay a marvelous contribution to the way Langland writes the self and to the study of individual identity in his culture, but it includes an original and totally convincing case for seeing the first ana­ grammatic signature of the B version, and its dense significance, in the passage inB II where, "Fortune me felte / and into pe lond of longynge and loue she me brou3te / And in a Mirour p hi3te middelerpe she made me biholde." The second chapter is "Politics and Poetics: Usk and Chaucer in the 1380s," by Paul Strohm. Us{ng the methods and admirable historical scholarship which inform his splendid book on Chaucer, Strohm compares the different ways in which Usk and Chaucer responded to the conflicts of the 1380s and how these conflicts were "refracted" in the very different, political, existential, and aesthetic choices that these two men made. Chapter 3 is an essay by Patterson on...