The Book and the Body ed. by Dolores Warwick Frese, Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER the important, if not large, number of English songs and proverbs that can be taken, with some caution, to represent the self-concepts of the peasantry. It would be unduly demanding to expect a scholar to survey a large field and also produce highly focused analyses in most of the areas it touches. Freedman's book has the energy and scope of a wide-ranging survey-though there might well have been more on the Jacquerie­ and it makes available a bulk of primary and secondary sources on the medieval conceptions and manifestations ofpeasantry. The bibliography is of great value, but it is a pity that the index is, for a book of this size and density, distinctly hypermetropic. But if that means that people have to plow steadily through the book, rather than seek the indulgence of a quick quote, that will appropriately prove a silent immobile labor with its own future reward. STEPHEN KNIGHT Cardiff University DOLORES WARWICK FRESE and KATHERINE O'BRIEN O'KEEFFE, eds. The Book and the Body. Notre Dame and London: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997. Pp. xviii, 169, including 9 black-and­ white illustrations. $24.95. Here is a compact, well-introduced book of four essays by eminent me­ dievalists on a topic ofgeneral contemporary interest. The essays consti­ tuted the 1995 Ward-Phillips lectures in English at the University of Notre Dame. The contributors show how absorbing are the possibilities in bodies as books, books as bodies. In the first essay, "Reading with Attitude, Remembering the Book," Mary Carruthers returns to an earlier interest in memory. Since her topic entails rehearsal of the fundamentals of medieval memory theory, the essay functions in part as a valuable condensation of these materials. At the same time it provides a fine backbone for the present volume (how oddly self-conscious the habitual bodily metaphors suddenly become in the context of a book on Body). Carruthers takes the opportunity to ar­ gue that the medieval process of memorizing, a process of etching loci, routes and likenesses in the mind, was envisaged not as studiously tran490 REVIEWS quil but as emotionally charged and even violent: as incision, mental vexation, harsh militaristic training. Converging in the Latinpungo, pun­ ctus, are the '"wounding' of page (in punctuation) and the wounding of memory (in 'compunctio cordis')" (p. 2). Carruthers develops the interconnections with practiced agility. We are put in mind of the harsh invasiveness of the act of writing on and erasing from parchment, but we are also put in mind of the cultivated "violence" with which the mind (it was recommended) memorizes and recalls or obliterates from memory. By the expression "Reading with Attitude" in her title, she alludes to the crucial dynamic role of a per­ son's attitude (intentio, or "gut reaction" [p. 1OJ) that reinforces the lay­ ing down and retrieval of a memory. The surprise in store for us here is that "gut reaction" was precisely what was commended in the words of John Cassian, who wrote that to be memorized effectively, knowledge must be inviscerata, "felt in your guts" (pp. 15-16). Conversely the ex­ pulsion (even excretion) of unwanted memories might be as traumatic as the attempt to erase script from a porous parchment. This essay opens The Book and the Body with powerful elan, but Mi­ chael Camille is guilty of no anticlimax in his ensuing discussion of "The Book as Flesh and Fetish in Richard de Bury's Philobiblon." Ar­ guing suggestively that whereas the modern library is a site designed for "purely mental" experience, in the medieval library books had immense tactile presence and were physically engaged with (pp. 40-41), Camille characteristically goes on to catch his medieval topic in the challenging cross-lights of modern theory, especially psychoanalysis. De Bury, ram­ pant book collector though he was, is found to show a curious distance from the physical objects of his desire. Camille hypothesizes that books must be thefetishized object of de Bury's desire-hence his treatise is an "occluded expression of personal possession in which the fetish object is hidden rather than revealed in language" (p. 46). The hypothesis makes...