Medieval Latin and Middle English Literature: Essays in Honour of Jill Mann ed. by Christopher Cannon and Maura Nolan (review)

Happy the teacher who receives the tribute of a book so charged with affectionate and grateful remembrance. The essays in this attractive collection follow no particular pattern, but the contributors often seem to be engaged in conversation with Jill Mann as they write, and a byproduct of their dialogue is a fine survey of her life’s work as teacher and colleague.

In the first of five essays on Chaucer, “The Man of Law’s Tale and Crusade,” Siobhain Bly Calkin compares the roles of marriage, commerce, and Christian proselytizing in the Tale and in fourteenth-century views of crusade. Custance’s “Surryen” marriage, in which commerce seems more important than Christian mission, results in neither conquest nor conversion, and can be read as “a condemnation of the historical failure of European crusading endeavors.” In Northumbria Custance effects the “divinely inspired and durably successful Christianization of a non-Christian realm,” heals a religious schism, and displays throughout the heroism of the ideal crusader. Calkin’s approach yields useful insights, though crusade is perhaps a less appropriate model than she suggests, and it is hard to see the latent “Briton” Christianity of Northumbria as schismatic.

Christopher Cannon, in “The Language Group of the Canterbury Tales,” reads the tales of the Friar, Nun’s Priest, and Manciple as illustrating the active, consequential power of language. All three tales are “rhetorical,” but whereas the formal rhetoric deployed by the Nun’s Priest and Manciple tends to be exposed as empty and futile, the homely dialogue of the Friar’s Tale is rhetorical insofar as it shows how words both do and do not express or convey knowledge, how context determines the effect of utterance. All three tales present deviations from a normative view of language as effective, as requiring and creating community, and so as essentially political.

In “The Canterbury Tales and Gamelyn” A. S. G. Edwards notes that Gamelyn survives only in mss of the Canterbury Tales, some of them early, and is nearly always assigned to the Cook. It does not appear in the earliest mss, Ellesmere and Hengwrt, but their layout indicates that their scribes expected to give the Cook a full tale; whether they were waiting for Gamelyn we cannot know, but despite its apparently sub-Chaucerian quality, this work was considered part of the Canterbury Tales from an early stage.

Ad Putter, in “Chaucer’s Complaint unto Pity and the Insights of Allegory,” meets the charge of “artificiality” head-on, reading the Complaint as a poem which deliberately calls attention to its mechanics, moving between abstract and proper nouns, qualities and people, inviting us to read the narrator’s attempt to “find” Pity as both dynamic (“discovery”) and stative (“feeling”). Pity itself is both a person, who lives and dies, and a virtue, which may be “dead” to one person but alive for another, and at whose death for the lover-poet the lady’s other virtues, her beauty, charm, and honor, become enemies, rendering her impossibly distant.

In “The Art of Passionate Song” Nicolette Zeeman, remarking the abundance of emotionally expressive song in Chaucer, Lydgate, and Henryson, considers its possible theoretical grounding. Treatises on composition, Latin and vernacular, offer a Boethian emphasis on formal structure as the source of pleasure in music and verse, but no general statement about the role of song in expressing emotion. But theorists of religious music and commentators on the poetic books of the Old Testament have much to say about the emotional effects of song of different types. Zeeman concludes rather abruptly that it is their theories, adapted to secular themes, that underlie the songs of Chaucer and his successors.

Rebecca Davis, “’Save man allone’: Human Exceptionality in Piers Plowman and the Exemplarist Tradition,” sets the Dreamer’s vision of Kynde in Passus B. XI in relation to the Latin tradition of the speculum naturae and shows...