Medieval Interpretation: Models of Reading in Literary Narrative, 1100–1500 by Robert S. Sturges (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER history and the many productions, the fact is that we-and I include myself-remain text-shy. There have been some-but not many-books on the "literary" side since Kolve's Play Called Corpus Christi (I think principally of Peter Travis's and MartinStevens's studies). There have been many productions of medieval dramas, but-outside the reviews of perfor­ mance-little commentary on the texts has developed as a consequence. Archival scholars have created a new history of the drama but comment rarely on the texts.Some of the most interesting recent work in medieval "theater" has been conducted by social and intellectual historians, from Charles Phythian Adams and Mervyn James to Gail Gibson and Kathy Ashley, but much-indeed, most-of this work is concerned with the phenomena, not the texts. We can easily ridicule earlier scholars for devalu­ ing these texts, but if we do not talk about them, are we not agreeing they are unworthy of discussion? I do not intend simply to defend the fathers, but I would like to point out that we would not be where we are without them. If we did not have the early editions, we would not have the present ones; if we did not have Chambers and others, we would not have Wick­ ham,Salter, the Malone Society, REED, and others. Instead, English scholars would becomplaining, asEckehardSimon does in his introduction and other essayists on Continental drama do in theirs, that much has to be done to reach the kind of discourse that English scholars have achieved. And, I might add, we have not yet "got it right," for it seems to me that we have made the transition from the old scholarship to an interest in perfor­ mance and drama without having entirely achieved the kind of unified view that Flanigan and Hughes call for in their essays on the liturgical drama. LAWRENCE M. CLOPPER Indiana University ROBERTS.STURGES. Medieval Interpretation: Models ofReading in Liter­ ary Narrative, 1100-1500. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991. Pp. x, 302. $39.95. For previous generations of scholars medieval studies were a bastion of historicalcriticism and methodology, a discipline where it was thought that really good readers were also good textual scholars and philologists. But slowly present-daydiscussions of a "new historical criticism" have begun to 212 REVIEWS alter the discourse of medieval studies, and medievalists have begun to engage with the poststructuralist questions of the "presence of the past" and the "construction of the reading subject" in interesting ways. In addition, medievalists have contributed more substantially to our under­ standing of the role semiotics has played in the development of Western thought. But overall, medieval studies, especially for the early period, still regard "theory" as an unwanted anachronism and "constructivist" or poststructutal history as a subversion of the historical critic's authority to shed his or her modern skin and speak for the minds of the past in an unmediated way. In his new book Robert Sturges claims to present a "history of reading" (p. 6) in the later Middle Ages and to show the relations as well as the differences between medieval notions of signification and textuality and those of postmodernism. Rather than subscribing to the grand recit of an epistemological rupture in the twelfth century, Sturges argues in chapter 1 that the "determinate and indeterminate modes of thought" (p. 11) con­ tinually compete with one another in the literary and intellectual culture of the later Middle Ages. Following R. Howard Bloch and Stephen Nichols, Sturges describes the "determinate mode of thought" as seeking to "guar­ antee signification as strictly as possible" (p. 8) by asserting "a predeter­ mined Christian meaning derived ultimately from God." Natural and linguistic signs are transparent and unequivocal elements ofa neoplatonic "directed vision." According to Sturges, the determinate mode ofthought privileges allegorical reading as a stable interpretive strategy, not only in literary texts but also in biblical exegesis, grammatical and rhetorical discourse, and historiography. By contrast, the "indeterminate mode ofthought," writes Sturges, relies on the ambiguity andopen-endedness ofthe literallevel ofthe text and the "tendency of language, especially written language, to falsify reality." The...