Readings in Medieval Textuality: Essays in Honour of A. C. Spearing ed. by Cristina Maria Cervone and D. Vance Smith (review)

This collection, Readings in Medieval Textuality: Essays in Honour of A. C. Spearing, offers fascinating insights not just into how we read in late medieval English literary studies but also into how we learn to read in this field. Twelve critical chapters, along with an introduction, two personal reflections, and a playful appendix, detail A. C. Spearing's critical impact on students, colleagues, and friends. As several of these essays affirm, it matters to study with someone like Spearing: personal interactions permanently shape the critical reading habits of students. As many of these chapters demonstrate, it is enriching to work with someone like Spearing: his colleagues attest to the generous, albeit challenging, exchanges they have had over the past several decades. And as the entire volume reveals, it is rewarding to read and reread Spearing: the arguments of this collection present close reading as a practice that is as vivacious as it is personal, a critical method that emerges from a capacious, sustained, and intimate struggle with late Middle English textuality. Most of the aforementioned insights are implicit and, certainly in no small coincidence, emerge from the form of the volume itself. Yet, the idea that close reading is a personal practice, one that continues to shape the contours of late Middle English literary studies, is worth greater attention and perhaps greater debate. Analysis of close reading is warranted because it is often treated as less rigorous, more subjective, than the other methodological terms associated with Spearing's oeuvre: form and historicism. Even the volume's detailed introduction, "A. C. Spearing's Work and Influence," seems a bit unsure about close reading, although Cervone and Smith confidently declare, "Illuminating close readings have always been a hallmark of Spearing's work" (p. xii).

In fact, some of the volume's richest interventions come as a consequence of close reading. The collection's first section, "Reading Experience and Experientiality," features three essays that use close reading—either of Chaucer, Spearing, or both—to yield new understandings of familiar texts. Derek Pearsall concentrates on one line, or really part of one line, the famous invocation of experience at the beginning of The Wife of Bath's Prologue, as a way of urging audiences to reconsider what they think they know about medieval understandings of experience itself. Elizabeth Fowler uses a reflection on the passions in Chaucer's Knight's Tale to pursue an idea, first articulated by Spearing, that subjectivity is not bound to individuals but rather takes on an extrinsic mobility, a "roaming" that is more familiar to us when we think about how emotions transfer between persons. And Claire Waters returns to Chaucer's "Adam Scriveyn," along with his self-presentation in the Prologue to Sir Thopas and his Retraction, to think about Chaucer as an "un-ending" poet. Through verse form (rhyme royal), as well as self-staging, Chaucer privileges the "middles" of his work, refusing to suggest that the end is a final destination, thereby inviting continuing study, return, and rereading.

The volume's second section, "Revisions and Re-visioning of Alliterative Poetry," engages Spearing's contributions to our understanding of some of the most formally dense, analytically challenging verse of the late Middle Ages, namely Cleanness and Piers Plowman. Kevin Gustafson sets Cleanness within the context of other vernacular religious verse, arguing that this poem's depiction of sodomy, incest, and sumptuous banqueting ultimately endorses "a recognizably medieval system of religious authority, in which clergy have the responsibility for transmitting and interpreting authoritative religious discourse" (p. 62). For Michael Calabrese, who reads Conscience's condemnation of clerical corruption (C Pro. ll. 95-124) and Will's remarks on the clergy in the pardon scene (C 9 ll. 255-79) as "the voice of the poet himself" (p. 65) in Piers Plowman, Spearing's...