The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray ed. by Helen Cooper and Sally Mapstone (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER HELEN COOPER and SALLY MAPSTONE,eds.The Long Fifteenth Century: Essays for Douglas Gray. Oxford: Clarendon Press,1997. Pp. x1, 362.$85.0 0. In their preface to The Long Fifteenth Century, the editors offer the plan for the book they have produced to mark the retirement of Douglas Gray,one of the most learned,humane,and genial literary scholars to teach at Oxford in the last thirty years.It is,they note,"a collection of essays to accompany one of [Gray's} most significant contributions to medieval studies,The Oxford Book of Late Medieval Verse and Prose (1985) ...a period that for him ...extends well into the sixteenth century (p. v)." Hence,The Long Fifteenth Century embodies Gray's vision,and its contents (as a glance at the bibliography of Gray's writings,carefully prepared by Joerg 0.Fichte,illustrates) reflect Gray's own published interests.The book presents,in roughly chronological order,essays by Gray's former students and Oxford colleagues on Lydgate and Chaucer, Hoccleve and his French predecessors,the Kingis Quair, "Jon the Blynde Awdelay," The Wars ofAlexander, ballads,morality plays,Henryson,Mum and the Sothsegger, Skelton's Bowge ofCourt and his Replycacion, Elyot's Pas­ quil the Playne, John Bale as a literary/historical critic and two generic/ theoretical pieces,on "Frames and Narrators in Chaucerian Poetry " and "Civil Strife and Father-Killing in the Prose Romances." The range of subject in this collection is remarkable,and designedly achieved. In her Introduction to the volume,Helen Cooper makes the point that Gray's Oxford Book was the most influential of a small handful of books that in the early 1980s began the reappraisal of then scarcely studied fifteenth-century literature.Now a decade later that "obscure " century is receiving significant scholarly attention. To carry forward Gray's groundbreaking achievement,"to help to change the way the [fifteenth century} is perceived," is,Cooper asserts,the mission and the challenge of this collection.And happily,the promise of such breadth is fulfilled by the accomplishment and richness ofthe essays the editors have chosen to include. In keeping with their commitment to bring forth the writers of the fifteenth century afresh,Cooper and Mapstone allot the first four places in their collection to essays that help sharpen distinctions between Chaucer and some of his "followers." In "'Dysemol daies and fatal houres': Lydgate's Destruction ofThebes and Chaucer's Knight's Tale," which opens the book, James Simpson carefully prunes away the chestnut 330 REVIEWS foliage of cliche-so oft repeated, so listlessly unexamined-that cakes Lydgate's poem as a botched extension of the opening Canterbury tale. "Lydgate's poem known as the Siege of Thebes," Simpson writes, "is in every respect a much darker, more saturnine work than has been com­ monly allowed. The strongest manuscript tradition, endorsed by Lyd­ gate from within the work, calls it the Destruction ofThebes. and destruc­ tion is indeed its subject. In this it may well answer to the period of its composition, which in my view is after the death of Henry V" (p. 1S). The number of strong claims made here in a few sentences is striking­ a new, "darker" interpretation, a fresh consideration of the manuscripts, the suggestion of a more accurate name and a better date of composition for a well-known work-and Simpson's historicized reading of Chaucer and Lydgate justifies his claims by essay's end. I quote Simpson at length here because in every way his opening lines epitomize the assertive originality of opinion and careful, transformative argumentation found throughout The Long Fifteenth Century. It is high time, as John Burrow points out, that Hoccleve's poetry was closely compared to the French poets he undoubtedly read, as well as to Chau­ cer. Here his essay, "Hoccleve and theMiddle French Poets," points the way by placing Hoccleve's Series, the Male Regle, and even (in passing) the Regiment ofPrinces in the context of the dits ofMachaut and Froissart and the work and career of Deschamps. Similarly, by foregrounding what the historical record has to tell us of the political and the personal James I, SallyMapstone rereads the...