A Companion to Medieval Poetry ed. by Corinne Saunders (review)

This is perhaps the most comprehensive of the numerous handbooks and thematic collections edited by the tireless Corinne Saunders, who is clearly a scholar with an encyclopedic grasp of the big picture and a determination to get it out there to students in omnibus form. In so doing she does us all a huge favor in putting well-chosen, up-to-date scholarship into the hands of undergraduate and graduate students alike (I can now see this book appearing on numerous comprehensive exam reading lists, for example) and saving us from the same tired old round of articles students find on Google. The only potential problem—and this is one that resides more with the press than the editor—is that the book is fairly expensive. This is not a problem unique to Blackwell: it is also the case with many of the excellent companion volumes that have come out to support medieval teaching in recent years—The Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, for example. I do find myself wondering from time to time, even as I rely on these books myself, and buy them on my research budget, if asking students to purchase massive books to carry around with their ever-tinier tablets is the most efficient way forward. But let us not get lost in another elegy for the literacy of the codex.

The book’s title is misleading. It is not a companion to medieval poetry, but to medieval English poetry. Anne M. Scott, reviewing the book for Parergon, noted this too. It may seem a quibble, but it reveals a parochialism that the book is otherwise without, so it is too bad.

Absolutely on the upside, however, is the fact that this is a companion to medieval English poetry. This is thrilling, especially to the formalist holdouts among us who teach poetry across several periods and insist on its autonomy and value. I will personally be assigning Saunders’s eight-page comprehensive introduction in several of my classes, both British literature surveys that begin in the Middle Ages, and in Middle English classes. She does a very good job of excavating a “living tradition” (3) of English poetry across languages and contexts in the period, rescuing it from the endless adhesions of cultural studies. She is much more temperate about this than I would be, as befits a scholar of medical humanities and the body who has read acres of paraliterary text in her time and incorporated them into her own work. Still, from the crankier new formalist end of the spectrum, I have to applaud the way this volume treats poetry as a continuously evolving entity that Old English and Middle English scholars, codicologists, and others can talk to one another about—several essays are clearly in dialogue, notably Saunders’s own on Chaucer (which replaced a projected essay by Derek Brewer, to whom the book is dedicated) with Nancy Mason Bradbury’s chapter on popular romance. I also like the way the volume has doggedly insisted that there were “Poets and Poems” both in the fourteenth century and the fifteenth century, mutually assuring scholars of those periods and keeping the fire lit under the emergent idea of vernacular poetic authorship.

This is not to say that the book is not fully respectful of time and tide. It moves chronologically and provides plenty of historical context from Old English and Anglo-Latin up to the end of the fifteenth century, as well as tracking evolving literacies and the history of the book. We get many of the usual suspects defending, or at least delineating, their bailiwicks: Andy Orchard on Old English and Latin, Ralph Hanna on Middle English manuscripts and readers, Helen Phillips on Chaucer’s dream-visions. Yet a few were more unexpected: Lawrence Warner on Piers Plowman rather than A. V. C. Schmidt, for example, who instead covers Pearl, Cleanness, and Patience. Not being an Old English scholar, I was not familiar with Daniel Anlezark, and enjoyed his two chapters on...