Later Middle English Literature, Materiality, and Culture: Essays in Honor of James M. Dean ed. by Brian Gastle and Erick Kelemen (review)

The introduction to this volume highlights James M. Dean’s contributions to medieval studies and describes how its collected essays contribute to the fields in which Prof. Dean has been most interested: Chaucer’s poetry, medieval political writings, and the ways in which people’s sense of time is shaped by their engagement with the material world and with literature. The volume is divided into two sections: “Textual Material” and “Material Texts.” As the editors explain, the first section “is devoted to traditions in a broad sense (Ovidian, rhetorical, grammatical) and to lasting cultural and social issues – particularly issues that might fall under the History of Ideas” (xiii). The essays in the second section “interpret . . . objects and explore their connections to the important literary and political texts of the age” (xvi). All of the essays “reflect a movement in medieval literary studies presaged by Jim’s scholarship throughout his career, whereby critical approaches to texts are undertaken with an understanding of the complex cultural and historical milieu that define the production of those texts and that which defines the production of our own work on those texts” (xviii). Indeed, the individual chapters and the volume as a whole illustrate how we can more fully appreciate the richness of later Middle English writings through careful attention to their textual and material networks.

The six essays in Part I focus on language and linguistic environments as they examine how texts speak to each other across time and genre. In “More Than Words Can Say?: Late Medieval Affective Vocabularies,” Mark Amsler presents a helpful study of the Latin term affectus and the use of its Middle English/Old French form, affecioun, by Geoffrey Chaucer, Margery Kempe, and medieval devotional writers. His essay asks us to consider emotional language outside of the rubric of affective piety as he argues for increased attention to how this language functions within the pragmatics of the social world. Karla Taylor’s “The Motives of Reeds: The Wife of Bath’s Midas and the Literary Tradition” continues to explore the medieval inheritance of Latin material by reading the story of Midas as “a window through which we may glimpse Chaucer’s conception of the translatio auctoritatis, in which writers working in the late medieval vernacular languages sought to lay claim to the classical tradition and make it their own in a new home” (p. 26). Taylor reads the Wife of Bath’s version of the Midas story in light of its classical and medieval sources (poems by Ovid, Jean de Meun, and Machaut), to show how the story highlights the problems of literary and linguistic transmission. In “A Taxonomy of Medieval English Travel Writings,” Christian K. Zacher describes various types of travel narratives produced during the late Middle Ages particularly as they relate to pilgrimage. Zacher notes an important shift from early medieval narratives that defer to the authority of previous travelers “to an inclination in later accounts – expressed instead of or along with indebtedness – to insist on the uniqueness of one’s own experienced trip” (p. 49). According to Zacher, this coincides with a move from piety to curiosity as a means of justifying travel, and these tensions can be seen particularly in Mandeville’s Travels.

Just as the first three essays highlight the importance of negotiating meaning within particular contexts, Joseph Turner’s “Lady Bertilak and the Rhetoric of Women in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight” examines how women in SGGK demonstrate a keen awareness of kairos, which is “the ‘context of communication’ [that] shapes the range of persuasive options available to the rhetor” (p. 58). This awareness gives the women in the poem significant power to influence the political and social world that only seems to be dominated by men. John M. Ganim...