The World Grown Old in Later Medieval Literature by James Dean (review)

REVIEWS JAMES DEAN.The World Grown Oldin Later Medieval Literature. Medieval Academy Books, no.101.Cambridge, Mass.: The Medieval Acad­ emy of America, 1997.Pp.xi, 379.$50. 00. This is a large and ambitious book underpinned by a wealth of citation, both primary and secondary.Its aim is "to demonstrate the significance of the medieval idea of the world grown old ...to the structures and themes of late-medieval literature" (p.1).This is not, it must be said, a new idea.The implications of the medieval formulation of the concept ofthe ages ofman has been fruitfully explored recently by John Burrow, Mary Dove, and Elizabeth Sears, among others.Dean, however, seeks ro give it a more specific focus through an examination ofits representation in the literary culture of fourteenth-century Europe.Afrer several intro­ ductory chapters (amounting to over a third of the book), there are indi­ vidual examinations of this subject in Jean de Meun, Dante, Langland, Gower, and Chaucer. The underlying preoccupation ofthis book is, then, with the explora­ tion of various forms of retrospection associated with an idealized past, which are juxtaposed against aspects of contemporary decline.Dean's basic argument is that such preoccupations are recurrent and significant in the works of a number of major poets.This assumption raises some obvious questions.The chief of these is, to what extent is it definable in ways that suggest it draws, across time and culture, on a common store of shared concerns that make it a readily identifiable formulation? Dean seems to acknowledge this problem implicitly in his long open­ ing chapter, "A Morphology ofSubtopics De Senectute Mundi" (pp.37111 ), in which he attempts to define the various categories or "ropics" (his term) that he sees as encompassing his subject : historical-doctrinal, apologetics, moral, scientific, and literary.Most of these categories are themselves subdivided, occasionally with further subdivisions.There are obvious dangers in such enumeration of complex material, some of which are represented in the discussion of "the eternity of the world" (pp. 89-94), which swiftly traverses philosophical terrain from Plato and Aristotle to Duns Scotus, Avicenna, Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, Grosseteste, and Bernardus Silvestris.Such scope leads inevitably to a degree of compression that leaves some of these matters seeming to be unclearly related to the chapters on particular authors that follow, which are concerned primarily with literary topics.The impressive erudition Dean presents throughout (the bibliography runs to over thirty pages) often seems unfocused in this chapter.There seems to be a quality of 341 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER inert encyclopedism to much of his documentation, a sense at times of straining to get everything in in ways that make it difficult to be sure what may be relevant to the argument because it is not clear what the argument is. Thus, to take a single instance, the briefdiscussion ofhunt­ ing (pp. 154-64) contains examinations of its relationship to the figure ofJupiter, its place among "the seven mechanical sciences" (p. 156), the relationship between man and animals as a metaphor for seduction, the importance of Thebes and the issue of private property. At such times, the weight ofcitation and engagement with secondary criticism deflects the development of a clearly focused thesis. Footnotes sometimes aim for a kind of exhaustiveness that is simply exhausting. Such lack offocus is linked to a general lack ofliterary analysis. Dean's conclusion about Piers Plowman, for example, is that it "should be re­ garded as more of a spiritualized historical narrative in a tradition of clerical reform and the world grown old and less of a political treatise in a tradition of social realism" (p. 231). This is to create spurious dis­ tinctions. I am not sure modern critics have thought of the poem as a "political treatise," but it is hard to see how "historical narrative" and "clerical reform" can be considered without a sense oftheir political im­ plications. Or why "the world grown old" is necessary to Langland's historical and spiritual explorations. The final chapter, on Chaucer (or, as Dean puts it "the late fourteenth­ century English poet and member of Richard II's faction at court" [271}-a curious mixture...