Biblical Paradigms in Medieval English Literature: From Cadman to Malory by Lawrence Besserman (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 121 Biblical Paradigms in Medieval English Literature: From Cadman to Malory. By Lawrence Besserman. New York: Routledge, 2012. ISBN 978-0-415-89794-5. Pp. xii + 219. $141.00. In this study of canonical medieval literary texts, Lawrence Besserman, emeritus professor of English at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, continues an argument for the imbricated nature of the secular and sacred in medieval English culture that also drove his editorial work on Sacred and Secular in Medieval and Early Modern Cultures: New Essays (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006). Besserman offers thorough readings of Ceedmons Hymn and two Middle English lyrics as well as detailed readings of portions of the Old English Exodus, Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Troilus and Criseyde, and Le Morte Darthur. The volume is extensively documented, with notes and bibliography comprising 69 of the 219 numbered pages. It would certainly be useful to the budding medievalist or any reader desiring orientation to these works and the scholarship surrounding them, scholarship which has, as Besserman writes in contextualizing his study, recently taken a "religious turn" (especially in the work of Nicholas Watson) that allows for "new, post-Robertsonian ways of understanding the role of religion" in ostensibly secular works (3). For D. W. Robertson, Ir.,a towering figure in Chaucerian studies, the problem of the interrelationship between the sacred and the secular in medieval culture was "only a pseudo-problem" since "the secular is always assimilated to the sacred:' For Besserman, however, such an "astigmatic" viewpoint assumes an orthodoxy among the medieval authors in question that is certainly questionable (5). Besserman posits a fluidity between sacred and secular concerns, meaning that "medieval English writers could appropriate biblically derived sacred motifs to express secular themes, and vice versa" (4). "Paradigm" is clearly a key term in the study, a term that also served Besserman in his capacity aseditor ofthe 1996Routledge volume TheChallengeojPeriodization: Old Paradigms and New Perspectives. For Besserman, a biblical paradigm functions in English medieval culture at the most general level in bifurcating the world into the godly and the demonic. According to this dualistic "shared religious-ideological horizon;' the world is at once "home to the Devil and a breeding ground for those well-known temptations to sin that, if succumbed to, will cause people to end up (if unrepentant) eternally damned, and home to the Savior and those remedies for sin that lead people (if repentant) to eternal bliss" (135). Within this overarching paradigm exist lesser paradigms derived from the Bible, including Trinitarian and psalmic structures in Ceedmon'sHymn and Davidic motifs in Beowulf. One could perhaps quibble at the expansiveness of definition that "paradigm" acquires within Besserman's study, since "biblical paradigm" may mean essentially any selection from or combination of "biblically derived diction, imagery, characterization, plot motifs, and themes" (1). In the Malory chapter, for example, Besserman argues that Kevin Grimm's observation in Malory's narrative of a parallel with the 122 CHRISTIANITY AND LITERATURE deuteronomistic view of history that shapes much of the Hebrew Bibleis "certainly valid, but far too general" (123). It seems to me, however, that what Grimm observes is properly a biblical paradigm and fully deserves that appellation, whereas the association between King Pelles and Joseph of Arimathea that Besserman notes by way of extending Grimm's insight is merely an allusion. (Better is Bessermans next addition, which retells how the Hermit who chastises Lancelot does so by means of the exemplum of Christ's cursing of the fruitless fig tree.) Forcing some rigid distinction between allusion and paradigm would be tendentious, however, as well as unfaithful to the spirit of Besserman's project, which denies that the secular and the sacred occupy different spheres in medieval English culture and concomitantly argues for the profane use of the sacred and the sacred use of the profane. As he states in a Chaucerian context, "the pervasive use of psalms and other biblical texts in the liturgy and in the colloquial diction deriving from it make any attempt to distinguish sharply between 'biblical language' and 'colloquial English religious diction' doomed to failure" (96). Whether or not they rise to paradigmatic status, the verbal or conceptual cases that Besserman makes...