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REVIEWS sion of the formal devices which should have insured it. McGerr's histor­ icizing tactics, though, must sometimes rely on insights from critics like Eco and Bakhtin, suggesting that our own history also be evoked when we attempt to historicize Chaucer. The book would have proved still more valuable, therefore, if it had not blurred relevant questions we are now pondering about the means, ends, and intentions of literary texts. Chief among these is whether McGerr is arguing for indeterminacy or ambiguity, since the terms are used interchangeably throughout. If, for example, The Canterbury Tales, including the Retraction, offer a "reading lesson," then its various ambiguities lead to that insight, which might be called its conclusion. If, on the other hand, it is impossible to tell where the textual argument about the ethics of reading and writing comes to rest, The Canterbury Tales is an indeterminate text and its eva­ sion of closure are far more telling. PEGGY A. KNAPP Carnegie-Mellon University STEPHEN G. NICHOLS and SIEGFRIED WENZEL, eds. The Whole Book: Cultural Perspectives on the Medieval Miscellany. Recentiores: Later Latin Texts and Contexts. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996. Pp. viii, 188. $37.50. There has been a considerable growth of interest on the part of medieval literary scholars during the last thirty years in the manuscripts of the texts they study. This interest has not, as in the more distant past, fo­ cused exclusively on the capacity of individual manuscripts to furnish an authentic or reliable witness of a text, but has extended to all aspects of text production and reception. Some of the most fruitful manuscripts for the study of these broader aspects of literary culture are those that consist of compilations of a miscellaneous or apparently miscellaneous nature. Many questions of genre, of the relationship between texts, of textual status and integrity, of the very nature of what constitutes a text, can be profitably reexamined, and in a more appropriately historical way, in the context of such codices. It was therefore a good idea for the Uni­ versity of Pennsylvania and Johns Hopkins University to call a collo­ quium of scholars in 1993 to discuss "the nature and usefulness of the concept 'miscellany,"' as the editors explain in their introduction. The 373 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER present volume is a compilation of the papers presented at the confer­ ence, and is in that sense an example of the phenomenon-or a symp­ tom of the condition-that it describes. For there is a specter that haunts miscellany-scholarship, in the form of the ever-present danger of attributing literary and cultural signifi­ cance to aspects of compilation practice that may have most to do with the practical necessities of text production and the availability of exem­ plars. Most scholars are reluctant to rest content with mere observation and description: conclusions must be drawn and theses proposed, ifonly to demonstrate the worthwhileness of the scholarly engagement. Mis­ cellanies will be promoted to anthologies (quite a different category of compilation), organized according to ascertainable principles of judg­ ment; or they may be seen as compilations that have been put together on such unusual principles that no one has hitherto detected them. It can become an exciting new game, with rules waiting to be made or no rules at all, and no necessary premise but the assumption that the com­ piler knew what he was doing-and maybe not even that. It is a great virtue of the present volume that the essays in it are by scholars experienced in their different fields, not likely to fall into jejune enthusiasms for finding significances where there are none. But in the absence of consistent arguments for hidden significance such as I have characterized, the volume is bound to lack coherence of the kind one usually looks for. Scholars will report this, and they will report that, and it was very nice of Michigan to publish their findings. I find it quite touching that the editors can claim that the "chapters" of their book "yield a certain and firm methodological or heuristic consensus" (p. 6). Brave words-but a scrutiny of the preceding paragraph will suggest...

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