Authorship and First-Person Allegory in Late Medieval France and England by Stephanie A. Viereck Gibbs Kamath (review)

The significance of Stephanie Kamath’s stimulating study of the impact of French first-person allegory, rooted in the Roman de la rose, on how subsequent writers conceived of vernacular authorship and the definition of poetic lineage, lies in its reorientation of critical perspective in two domains. She first determines the importance of Guillaume de Deguileville as a channel for Rose reception concerned with ‘the first-person narrator-protagonist of allegory as a figure for textual production and interpretation’ (pp. 8–9). Deguileville studies are a burgeoning area of interest in medieval French literature; Kamath ensures that our attention is arrested by his role in shaping ‘the figurative discourse of poetic identity’ (p. 14). The second reorientation builds on the first, assessing English writers’ debt to Deguileville (and to other mediators of the Rose) in terms of poetic practice rather than shared thematic interest. Authorship contributes thereby to a current surge of interest in late medieval literary relations between France and England. Kamath identifies the self-referential quality of late medieval allegory as key to its influence on thinking about authorship, working through three figurative strategies: practices of authorial self-naming; according a writerly role to the narrator-protagonist; and presenting certain passages of text as separate, embedded documents. The study proceeds through four chapters. Chapter 1 establishes the figurative strategies at work in the Rose before analysing in detail how Deguileville’s Pèlerinage de la vie humaine (in its earlier and later versions) develops the interplay of allegory and authorship as its principal debt to the Rose and, thereby, its primary legacy for later vernacular literature. Chapters 2 to 4 each take a self-naming English poet (Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Hoccleve, John Lydgate) in order to re-envision an accurate and productive literary context for these writers, who are seen as key to the formation of the medieval English canon. A brief Coda adroitly addresses the personification Poor Understanding as emblematic of critical misjudgement of how ‘reading and writing allegory in this period forms a vibrant critical discourse on poetic identity and responsibility’ (p. 176). All chapters are of interest to a French Studies readership for the reassessment of literary inheritance that they describe. For Chaucer, where Machaut has been seen as key, the Rose as mediated by Deguileville is proposed as the more pertinent prism through which to view the metatextual dimension of the English poet’s work. In Chapter 3, the importance is demonstrated of Hoccleve’s translations of Christine de Pizan and Deguileville for his self-presentation and reflection on relations between voice and authority. The allegorical tradition, especially through translation and mediation of the Rose (by Chaucer and Laurent de Premierfait), is identified in Chapter 4 as a significant context for reading Lydgate. Kamath’s dexterous unpicking of established networks of allusions, citation, and translation provokes fresh interrogation, both generally of channels of English reception of French literary models, and specifically of the prominence of first-person allegory as a vehicle for reflection on vernacular authorship.