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Reviews 169 French ones. Perhaps for this reason she has used the French courtoisie in italics (HI.3 & 30, pp. 64-65) to translate cortoisie, which does not figure in the glossary and is elsewhere rendered as 'courtesy\ A few other translations can be questioned: 'scoundrels' (orfelons, 'jokes' for (faus) jogleor, and 'pleasant' for plaisans in the apostrophe Damn plaisans. The abrupt change from first-person singular to third person and then back tofirstperson, all referring to the loverpoet (IV.46-47, p. 67), merits comment as also does the subtle expression of the interdependence of the merit and worth of lover-poet and lady (XIII.42-45, p. 104), which is obscured by the translation as a first person singular of monteplie (1.44), listed as third person singular in the glossary. The various forms of the poet's name, collated in table II, occur in fifteen poems. Andrieu's tendency to argue on the wrong side is emphasized by Guillaume le Vinier in the jeu-parti the two poets exchange (XXI.25-26, p. 129). The glossary gives only one meaning for contredit, 'one who disputes', but the word also means 'who refuses', '(who is) cursed or damned', and, when applied to a verdict or opinion, 'contradictory'. The name might thus also reflect the poet's sense of misfortune or his ill-starred experience in love of which he sings. These are small quibbles about an edition which will serve scholars and students very well and allow appreciation of the poems and melodies of a hitherto little-known trouvere. Glynnis M . Cropp Department of European Languages Massey University Patterson, Lee, Chaucer and the subject of history, London, Routledge, 1991; paper; pp. xiv, 489; R.R.P. AUS$34.95 [distributed in Australia by the Law Book Company]. This volume is comprised of eight chapters on Chaucer's life and writings, four of which have been published earlier as very solid and powerful scholarly articles. Three of these were based on particular aspects of the Canterbury Tales and the fourth treated of 'Memory and modernity in Chaucer'. This previous sub-title, together with the present 'Introduction' and 'Afterword', gives us a valid approach to the author's theme and purpose, that' . . . in late-twentiethcentury America, perhaps in the West as a whole, human life is conceived in terms of a basic unit the autonomous, free, self-determining individual' (p. 3). This contemporary individualism is seen as a style of behaviour fashioned in order to defy the realities routinely designated by the terms 'society' and 'history', to cast off the past and so to improvise a 'radically empty' self, personally autonomous and only saved from complete emptiness by the attempt at personal friendship. 170 Reviews From this encompassing ideology the writer draws back to the traditional notion, advanced in 1860 by Jacob Burkhardt that 'freestanding individuals' in Western culture are to be found only in Renaissance texts. Previously, as the great nineteenth-century cultural historian had put it: 'Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category' (p. 7). Thus it is that Patterson seeks to establish the beginnings of the m o d e m in the later mediaeval period, in the rise of cupiditas as opposed to caritas, and to rejection of a Boethian 'intention' that tends ineluctably towards the summum bonum. This struggle for a personal identity is discerned in the confrontation between monasticism and an emergent scholasticism. Thus early and depersonalised allegory is set aside in favour of 'a temporally inflected autobiograpical discourse' in Jean de Meun's La Vieille. In short this remarkably rich text seeks to explore, with a myriad of generous and probing passing observations, what Michel Zink has recently defined so clearly in thirteenth-century French poetry: 'the confrontation of the subject with the determinations of the exterior, present world'. Thus Dante's Commedia, Langland's Piers Plowman, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, as well as so much of Chaucer's later writing, may all be shown to be grounded in the drama between the subject and its historicised relations. Patterson is able to represent what literary criticism has...

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