Oral Tradition in the Middle Ages ed. by W. F. H. Nicolaisen (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER extent of Franciscan influence in medieval devotional and pastoral lit­ erature. Several essays intersect in illustrating the competing medieval impulses toward univocality or multivocality of authoritative discourse (Minnis, von Nokken, Hanna, Emery); additional linkages between the volume's chapters can be found with little difficulty. This richness demonstrates the continuing creative force of the scholarship to which Professor Wenzel has contributed so influentially and makes the volume a fitting tribute to those contributions. M. TERESA TAVORMINA Michigan State University W. F. H. NICOLAISEN, ed. Oral Tradition in the Middle Ages. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, vol. 112. Binghamton: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1995. Pp. vi, 231. $24.00. The twelve essays in this collection were selected from those presented at the Twenty-Second Annual Conference of the Center for Medieval and Early Renaissance Studies held at Binghamton, New York, in 1988. The conference's theme, now the title ofthe volume, was chosen in con­ nection with the centennial of the American Folklore Society, cele­ brated in the same year. Its editor describes the collection as intended to provide "a sampling of the vast scope of current studies in oral tra­ dition" (p. 2), and indeed its range extends to works in Old and Middle English, Old French, Middle Irish, Hebrew, Greek, medieval Latin, Serbo-Croatian, and Old Norse-Icelandic. Nicolaisen's brief introduc­ tion points to a few of the most basic questions and best-known schol­ arly works in the lively area in which folklore methodologies intersect with other means of discovering and evaluating the evidence that re­ mains for medieval oral traditions. Oral Tradition in the Middle Ages inherits its structure from the con­ ference: four "plenary papers" and eight "sectional papers." Two of the plenary papers, those by the late Albert B. Lord and by John Miles Foley, range widely over various literatures-ancient, medieval, and modern-in pursuit of continuities between oral compositions and the written literatures that Sl.!rvive from the Middle Ages. Lord's piece is typical of his later work in moving away from the search for evidence of 286 REVIEWS spontaneous composition in performance toward a better understand­ ing ofthe stylistic choices made by medieval writers influenced by oral traditions. Foley takes a more emphatic step in the same direction, ar­ guing that such texts, which he calls "oral-derived," are ill served by aesthetic criteria that take account only of the norms of textuality and neglect ways of meaning that are unique to oral traditions. His argu­ ment, more fully developed in Immanent Art (1991), is that oral-derived works encode and express meaning metonymically-they use estab­ lished traditional structures (formulas, themes) to convey a wealth ofas­ sociations carried over from previous contexts in which their audiences have encountered them. Carl Lindahl's essay cautions against simplistic equations between "written" and "elite" on the one hand, and "oral" and "folk" on the other, and uses late medieval romance as a medium through which to seek "a culturally variegated view of medieval oral artistry" (p. 59). His essay shows the advantages of marking out the common ground between elite and folk performance styles and labeling the overlap "neutral" instead of"elite" (p. 65), thus offering a welcome corrective both to the exaggerated binarism "elite versus folk," and to the distorting tendency to see non-elite art forms only as corruptions of elite ones. Joseph Falaky Nagy's piece on the Irish Acal/am na Senrfrach ("Colloquy ofthe Ancients") offers another promising means ofillumi­ nating the oral and literary backgrounds to a written work of complex cultural origins. Like many medieval texts, the Acal/am claims to record oral materials otherwise in danger ofvanishing, and Nagy shows the re­ sultant tension between the norms ofwritten composition and those of the oral art forms that the work purports to transmit. Nagy's reading of this internal tension as dynamic and artistically productive affirms the central argument of Aron Gurevich's undervalued Medieval Popular Culture (1988). A very brief account of the materials and methods of each will have to suffice to convey the interest and variety ofthe eight sectional papers. Saul Levin traces the...