Art and Context in Late Medieval English Narrative: Essays in Honor of Robert Worth Frank, Jr. ed. by Robert R. Edwards (review)

REVIEWS we be absorbed into "a stabilizing vision that connects desire to death for the female reader" (p. 228) and that celebrates cultural imperialisms. Read­ ing Dido, while deeply grounded in traditional philology and literary his­ tory, paradoxically inscribes an act of radical resistance in pioneering a politics of reading, as well as in offering a preliminary model of "feminist self-fashioning." LESLIE CAHOON Gettysburg College ROBERT R. EDWARDS, ed. Art and Context in Late Medieval English Narra­ tive: Essays in Honor ofRobert Worth Frank,Jr. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1994. Pp. xiv, 205. $63.00. Dignum et justum est that the long and esteemed career of Robert Worth Frank, Jr.-scholar, editor, professor-should be celebrated in this volume of essays edited by Robert R. Edwards. In fitting tribute to Frank's lifelong scholarly vocation to Langland, to Chaucer, and to medieval studies in general, Edwards has organized his collection into three clusters of essays by twelve distinguished medievalists: four essays on Piers Plowman, four exclusively on Chaucer, and a final four on a mix of medieval topics. C. David Benson's opening essay is instructive to some of us who, like Benson himself, are nonspecialists in Langland and who over the years have tiptoed around the scholarly fringes of Piers Plowman, probably because of our discomfiture with the poem's perplexing amorphousness. Amorphous though it may appear, as Benson generously admits, the poem only seems so because readers have come to it with fictive expectations of beginnings, middles, and ends such as we find in other famous Ricardian poems. Rather, we should put aside such predilections for traditional form and approach the poem as noncontinuous narrative, with its "outer layer of tale telling" deliberately stripped away-and here I admire Benson's metaphys­ ical conceits-like the Pompidou Center or a Brecht play.Such a structure, freshly perceived, would encourage readers to discount ordinary concerns about how things "turn out" sequentially, or even allegorically, and invite them to "customize" the poem to their specific doctrinal and moral needs. It may be argued that the following three essays on Piers Plowman do just that. 209 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Elizabeth Kirk, for example, connects Langland's innovative representa­ tion of the Passion of Christ and his Harrowing of Hell in passus 18 of the B text (totally unlike late-fourteenth-century accounts in the mystics or in the mystery plays) to his daring experiential theology, which heterodox­ ically disjoins the human from the divine in his narrative rendering of the Hypostatic Union. (That ancient doctrine, of course, had defined Christ with two natures, human and divine, but united in a single person.) By narrating the Passion and the Harrowing as witnessed by "discontinuous but complementary" (p. 23) observers therein, Langland distinguishes be­ tween the two natures of Christ and thus between the roles of Piers and Christ in the larger context of the poem. Experiential theology too informs Anna Baldwin's discussion of older and newer English medieval debt laws. She argues that remnants of the older debt law that had survived into Langland's day are transmogrified in the poem into metaphors for Old Testament bondage, whereas the new debt law-with its emphasis on personal responsibility-serves as a metaphor for New Testament freedom. Ifa palpable imperative ofthe poem is redde quod debes, then the movement from Dowel to Dobest corresponds to an unfolding awareness of the terms of the debt-not only as it relates to personal sin but especially to the urgency of others' needs. Another important theological, and scriptural, metaphor in Piers Plowman-this one from the C text at 17.48-50-is uncovered by M. Teresa Tavormina in the last of these opening four essays. She connects Liber Arbitrium's criticism of the corrupt fourteenth-century clergy in Langland's phrase "charite pat cheild is now" to the eschatological warning of Matthew 24:12: "And because iniquity hath abounded, the charity of many shall grow cold." Her survey of "Chilling-of-Charity" cita­ tions leads beyond Matthew to a catena of eschatological allusions in a variety of Middle English works, like the Pricke of Conscience, all of which interpret such...