The Classicist Writings of Thomas Walsingham: "Worldly Cares" at St Albans Abbey in the Fourteenth Century by Sylvia Federico (review)

Sylvia Federico's The Classicist Writings of Thomas Walsingham: "Worldly Cares" at St Albans Abbey in the Fourteenth Century offers the first full-length study of Thomas Walsingham's complete works. Although generally regarded as a pivotal source of fourteenth-century history and politics, the writings of this prolific St. Albans monk have garnered infrequent attention as texts. James G. Clark's A Monastic Renaissance at St Albans: Thomas Walsingham and His Circle c. 1350–1440 (2004) cornered this market by examining Walsingham's participation in St. Albans's active manuscript production during the late Middle Ages. Nevertheless, as Federico acknowledges in her introductory note, the recent edition and translation of the St Albans Chronicle by J. Taylor, W. Chils, and L. Watkiss (2003) provides new opportunities for the field of Walsingham studies, opportunities that make the scope of Federico's research possible. To the small corpus of Walsingham studies, Federico contributes a unique interpretation of his copious Latin works that she frames with a vernacular context that begins with the developments of Italian humanists such as Boccaccio and concludes with the adaptations of English poets such as Chaucer. This reconstructed literary context facilitates a wide-ranging analysis organized according to chronology and genre, the latter of which extends from commentaries to romances.

The book contains four chapters in addition to a brief introduction and conclusion. The Introduction begins by claiming that Walsingham's works merit study for more than their accounts of the 1381 uprising and of Richard II's enigmatic character. More specifically, Federico invites attention to Walsingham's overlooked political applications of classical literature, applications that he shared with Chaucer, Gower, and other notable writers of the late fourteenth century. Placed among these authors, Walsingham proves to be a particularly English writer who shared not only their literary tastes but also their emerging protohumanist classicism. Comparing Walsingham to Chaucer and other important English and Italian writers of the period, Federico establishes the terms that relate Walsingham to this tradition, such as his Chaucerian means for drawing attention to himself as an auctor and his influence on subsequent writers, especially John Lydgate. Federico further elucidates the traits that render Walsingham an auctor by using his biography to examine developments in his writing career, decoding his works according to his own authorial intentions rather than analyzing them as fodder for other, reputedly more important writers.

Chapter 1 discusses how Walsingham manipulates aesthetic and political tropes in ways that allow him to speak simultaneously to audiences inside and outside his monastery. The chapter relates his Liber benefactorum to Chaucer's General Prologue and his Prohemia poetarum (a collection of classical and medieval tragedies) to Chaucer's Monk's Tale. The comparisons demonstrate that Walsingham, like Chaucer, adopted Italian humanists' preoccupation with de casibus exempla and political characterizations. Federico illustrates the latter point by analyzing the portraits inserted into Walsingham's otherwise unremarkable account book of St. Albans benefactors; the resulting benefactor characterizations nearly reach Chaucerian proportions.

The second chapter studies Walsingham's story of Alexander the Great, the Historia Alexandri magni principis, in relation to both his acknowledged and unacknowledged sources: namely, the Travels of Sir John Mandeville, late medieval Alexander romances, Gower's Constance story, and Lucan's Pharsalia—sources that share the Historia Alexandri's interest in exotic locations. Federico claims that the Historia Alexandri's narrative integrates these diverse sources into the format of an advice manual, or mirror for princes, only to admonish the failure to accept advice, an admonishment that emphasizes acadia (the vice of spiritual wandering) and that offers its Alexander text as a means for counteracting it.

Chapter 3 compares Walsingham's Ditis ditatus to Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde, claiming that both works respond to...