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  • Medieval into Renaissance: Essays for Helen Cooper ed. by Andrew King, Matthew Woodcock
  • Lynn Staley
Medieval into Renaissance: Essays for Helen Cooper. Edited by Andrew King and Matthew Woodcock. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2016. Pp. x + 285. 5 b/w illustrations. $99.

If we did not already know the depth and breadth of Helen Cooper’s learning and scholarly achievements, this volume is evidence of her scholarly reach and of her personal and intellectual impact on her students. It is a tribute to her mentorship, as well as to her own erudition. Both are driven by curiosity and by love of learning. The essays in this volume—which range from Chaucer and Gower to Skelton, Thomas Churchyard, Shakespeare, and eighteenth-century chapbooks—bespeak a curiosity that always leads to the next interest. Only a scholar trained rigorously in medieval culture could encompass such a range and inspire her students to investigate such various texts and genres and their temporal, thematic, and formal relationships.

The Introduction takes up the subject of literary periodization, arguing that our understanding of literary history should be an investigation of the “porousness of periodic boundary lines” with attention paid to “continuity, inheritance, preservation and memory” (p. 6). Here, King and Woodcock follow Cooper’s lead, who, since her first monograph, Pastoral: Medieval into Renaissance, has argued for a more elastic way of thinking of literary periods.

The essays are arranged chronologically, and my remarks will follow that arrangement. The first essays probe the relationships between medieval and Renaissance texts; thereafter the essays are more fully grounded in Early Modern concerns, moving on finally into the eighteenth century.

Alexandra Gillespie’s “Unknowe, unkow, Vncovthe, uncouth: from Chaucer and Gower to Spenser and Milton” approaches issues of periodization through the ways in which Chaucer’s language was transmitted into print. Gillespie begins by focusing upon the spelling of Chaucer’s words, which her title is meant to indicate, in both manuscript and early printed editions. Her point is, however, larger than spelling and moves to semantics as a way of quizzing the attitudes of later poets toward their acknowledged master, Chaucer, who persistently refuses too many incursions on his privacy.

Cooper has put her mark on studies of the medieval romance, an interest that also appears in this volume. R. W. Maslen (“Armour that doesn’t work”) looks at passages in medieval and Renaissance romance where the armor that signifies the identity of the knight does not function properly and thus exposes the man wearing the armor, producing what is a human drama and not simply the chivalric action of the romance. Megan G. Leitch (“‘Of his ffader spak he no thing’: Family Resemblance and Anxiety of Influence in Fifteenth-Century Prose Romance”) explores the Middle English prose romances as a subgenre, as responses to the courtly romances. Because they raise disturbing problems, like genetic inheritance, Leitch suggests that they are in dialogue not simply with courtly romances but also with chronicles and didactic writing on crucial issues relating to family and governance. Aisling Byrne (“Writing Westwards”) analyzes Early Modern Irish texts of medieval romances, thus outlining the evidence for the circulation in Ireland of medieval English romances between the fifteenth and the seventeenth centuries. James Wade’s “Penitential Romance after the Reformation” examines romance in the context of the Reformation, an especially important topic since many romances in their staging of penance are inseparable from their roots in Catholic sacramental theology and practice. These penitential romances thus offer [End Page 417] a way into an emerging and popular Protestant consciousness that is rooted in the past but, nonetheless, attuned to an emphasis upon “interiority and identity” (p. 106).

The issue of periodization is equally important in essays considering issues relating to authority and genre. Mary C. Flannery (“The English Laureate in Time”) discusses John Skelton’s Garland of Laurel as evincing Skelton’s understanding of literary culture as continuous and evolving, thus suggesting that Skelton himself denied the usefulness of strict boundaries between periods and places. Matthew Woodcock (“Thomas Churchyard and the Medieval Complaint Tradition”) likewise argues for a continuous tradition, using Churchyard’s employment of medieval literary genres to...

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