The Rusted Hauberk: Feudal Ideals of Order and Their Decline ed. by Liam O. Purdon, Cindy L. Vitto (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER the book, with contributors being thanked for their "patience": this is not the only essay that seems to have lain untouched since the mid-1980s, by the evidence of their failure to acknowledge more recent work. Among these is Piotr Sadowski's "Time Structure and the Narrative Framework of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight." This essay draws parallels between the ages of man, the seasons, and Gawain's adventures without showing any awareness of John Burrow's The Agru- of Man (1986), which explores the same topics. An even more dated essay is J. D. Pheifer's "Malory's Lan­ celot," which traces the development of Lancelot from Chretien to Malory in a painstaking and densely illustrated way but cites no other scholar's work since 1974. I am less qualified to judge the two essays on Spenser's Faerie Queene: Richard A. McCabe's "Prince Arthur's 'Vertuous and Gentle Discipline'" and Gerald Morgan's "The Meaning of Spenser's Chastity as the Fairest of Virtues." The book as a whole, though uneven in quality, offers instructive and interesting, even pleasurable, reading. One frustration in the reading, how­ ever, is poor editing, from frequent typos through misspellings:prophru-y for prophecy and vice versa (pp. 176, 272), among others, including the puzzles interally (p. 53: literally?) and unxious (p. 273: anxious? unctuous?), to sole­ cisms (e.g., "refers to 'she whom I behold'" [p. 227}) and surprises such as Article for Arcite (p. 36). The accuracy of quotations is also unreliable (Cooney's essay is particularly bad in this respect); nor are translations offered for passages quoted in Latin, Old French, and Italian. Many of the contributors will be well known to readers ofStudiru- in the Age ofChaucer through their previous publications, but not all the names will be familiar to American audiences (there is no contributors' list); the latter include a number of younger academics from Trinity College and other Dublin institutions. The Irish Academic Press is to be congratulated for bringing their work to a wider audience. MARY HAMEL Mount Saint Mary's College LIAM 0. PuRDON and CINDY L. V1rro, eds. The Rusted Hauberk: Feudal Ideals ofOrder and Their Decline. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994. Pp. xxi, 338. $44.95 cloth, $19.95 paper. This is an attractively produced and carefully edited collection of twelve essays on the timely topic of the decay of the feudal ideal in the later 248 REVIEWS Middle Ages. The contributors include both historians and literary scholars, and the editors in the introduction, with a gesture toward the credos of the New Historicism, emphasize the active interrelationship be­ tween literary texts and historical processes. The collection covers a wide range ofground, from the Chanson de Rolandto the Tudor period, although the center is the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The essays, which inevitably do not cohere quite as much as the editors hope or claim, are symmetrically divided into six groups of two each. The first of these is called "Resisting Dissolution: Validating Feudal Ideals of Order" and in­ cludes essays by Cindy L. Vitto on the Middle English Cleanness and by Daniel F. Pigg on Piers Plowman. Vitto concentrates on feudal relations and reason in Cleanness, arguing that the mutual relation between lord and vassal is shown to be necessary for the stabilization ofsociety. Pigg also sees the feudal relationship as essential to Langland's conception of a restored social order, his reading of the plowing of the half acre being especially illuminating in this connection. Part 2, "Containing Change: Modifying Feudal Ideals of Order," has a contribution by Jean Jost on Chaucer's "aristocrats" and their linguistic superiority, arguing that Chaucer's male aristocrats-the Knight and the Squire-use language to maintain their social superiority in the face of claims of emerging, but lower, social orders. Also included is an essay by Liam Purdon and Julian Wasserman on chivalry and feudal obligation in Barbour's Bruce, which convincingly shows how Barbour exposes the lim­ itations ofthe old chivalric ideal through the behavior ofRobert Bruce and argues for a modified, more egalitarian form of feudalism. "Disenfranchising Women: Limiting Feudal Ideals ofOrder" is...