The Medieval Literary: Beyond Form ed. by Robert J. Meyer-Lee and Catherine Sanok (review)

If I wax rhapsodic about this collection of essays, it’s because it’s one of the best I have ever reviewed or read in my 30 years in the profession and comes at a time when literary study—and the entire field of medieval studies—seems imperiled from so many different forces. The majestic work here dramatically affirms the perpetual modernity and relevance of the texts and cultural works of our period. By studying literary “form,” variously manifested in words, sounds, images, and manuscripts, this series of case studies of a diverse range of texts mounts an implicit manifesto for the dramatic way that medieval creative arts speak deeply to the aesthetic, ethical, and moral concerns of modern readers, scholars, and students. The editors introduce these issues with a critical overview of what been written about “form” in recent decades and how the current project hopes to contribute. Challenged frequently is the false distinction that one might make between the instrumental (the useful, functional, practical, didactic) and the literary (the affective, creative, imaginary, artful), which are often—and in dynamic ways—actually inseparable in the texts at hand.

In an elegant, clear, and accessible essay, Clair Waters writes about Marian texts, which are prime candidates for the accusation of being simplistic, facile, and non-literary. Waters exposes the distinction between the instrumental and the aesthetic as artificial and anachronistic when it comes to these particular texts, which work purposefully and dynamically by generating an audience’s affective response and spiritual engagement. This work will be of particular interest to those who are professionally or personally devoted to Mary. Ingrid Nelson then also exposes the false dichotomy between the instrumental and the aesthetic in certain grammatical texts, exploring how they are situated and glossed in manuscripts in what she calls a process of “dilation,” that is, a process of engagements and elaborations which, as Waters had argued for the Marian texts, is dynamic and generative. The featured text in this richly detailed and innovative essay is the lyric poem “Erthe toc of erthe,” which functions like a series of puzzles or “equivoca”—full of ambiguity and complexity of meaning. Nelson then applies the notions of equivocation and dilation to a 13^th-century French equivocal grammar, a genre that bridges the didactic to the aesthetic, exemplified by the witty and “very “literary” Tretiz of Walter de Bibbesworth, intended to teach the French language to English speakers.

Jessica Brantley then explores keenly the understudied genre of the “metrical or versified calendar” (67) as composed by the prolific John Lydgate in his “Kalandre,” a poeticized version of the catalogue of saints days. Even though Lydgate’s text is found exclusively in poetic collections, its form reflects a “Latinate layout. . .that offers the text as a vernacular entry into the liturgy” (75). “Readers of Lydgate’s poem,” Brantley continues, “understood the ways in which [the poem] both mimicked liturgical forms and enabled literary ones” (77), as she examines the marginal treatment of the text in its manuscript setting. Lydgate’s semi-liturgical efforts were rewarded, so to speak, when in 1523 Wynkyn de Worde printed the Kalandre, the start of a Book of Hours, and so “Lydgate’s vernacular poem ultimately does find a home in precisely such a [liturgical] volume” as had sparked its genesis and form (80).

The next set of essays entitled “Form Performed” begins with Katherine Kirby Fulton’s and Andrew Klein’s essay on the poem King Horn, written in aabb rhyming couplets but depicted in various ways on the page (in half lines, as long lines of two verses together, in an inconsistent mix, etc.) indicating how scribes struggled with how best to present the text formally to account for its various hybrid poetic features, gesturing in an archaizing impulse toward the past forms of alliterative poetry and forward to more contemporary forms and rhyme. The next part of the essay fascinatingly explores the...