Book Reviews

The Shape of Air: American Sign Language as Narrative Prosthesis in 21st Century North American Media

Disability as Metaphor and Lived Experience in Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall Jason S. Farr (bio) Disability studies scholars often champion the investigation of the lived experiences of disability over metaphor. In Disability Theory, for instance, Tobin Siebers historicizes disabled bodies in part because metaphor often converts disability into something else.1 Given the exclusionary nature of ableist metaphors, Siebers adopts this approach for good reason. I would argue, however, that we are at a point now in eighteenth-century literary disability studies in which we can do both; that is, we can uncover lived experiences of disability in the eighteenth century and we can take metaphor seriously. By juxtaposing literary representations of ableist metaphor with dynamic, three-dimensional portrayals of disability, we may conceptualize how disability was often imagined as deprivation but also how it could serve personally and socially transformative ends in narrative. To show how such a method works, I examine Samuel Richardson's Pamela (1740) and Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall (1762): two novels that portray physical disability in starkly different terms. Pamela conceives of deformity as a plot device while Millenium Hall reveals how socially constructed bodily standards subjugate disabled people.2 Despite their differences, these novels depict disability and queerness as transformative narrative devices for imagining social and sexual reform. [End Page 309] In Pamela, Richardson shores up the able-bodied, heterosexual romance between Pamela and Mr. B. through Mrs. Jewkes, who is portrayed as monstrous in her embodiment and queer desire. In its plot development, Pamela adheres to the tenets of what David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder call "narrative prosthesis," or a transhistorical representational model in which disability serves as a "crutch" for generating plot conflict and resolution.3 According to the tenets of narrative prosthesis, "the materiality of metaphor" is the tendency of narrative to make abstract concepts visible in the disabled body, which are first uncovered and then explained and justified. As a result, disability is brought from the margins to the heart of the narrative before it is finally rehabilitated, fixed, or eradicated.4 In Pamela, Mrs. Jewkes's disability and queerness work together as narrative prostheses to ground Richardson's conceptions of libertinism, female virtue, and sentiment. For example, upon first meeting Mrs. Jewkes, Pamela describes her in these terms: "She is a broad, squat, pursy, fat Thing, quite ugly. … She has a huge Hand, and an Arm as thick as my waist. … Her nose is flat and crooked, and her Brows grow over her Eyes; a dead, spiteful, grey, goggling Eye, to be sure, she has. And her Face is flat and broad."5 Mrs. Jewkes is also said "to waddle" when she walks, indicating a mobility impairment that would appear to supplement her monstrous body and intentions (PA, 114). Pamela's portrayal of Mrs. Jewkes reveals physiognomic thought, in which an unconventional appearance mirrors inward depravity. Pamela's caricature of Mrs. Jewkes's facial features—the sustained attention to her "flat and crooked" nose and eyebrows—is supposed to reveal her inner wickedness (114). Pamela construes Mrs. Jewkes's face as a metaphorical repository of uncouthness that threatens young women's virtue. Mrs. Jewkes's character also symbolizes the libertine sexuality that Richardson hopes to expunge from British society. Mrs. Jewkes pursues Pamela aggressively, just as Mr. B. does. In these characters' alignment, Mrs. Jewkes's deformity becomes a metaphor for Mr. B.'s sexual excess. Pamela describes her first meeting with Mrs. Jewkes in these terms: "The naughty Woman came up to me with an Air of Confidence, and kiss'd me, See Sister, said she, here's a charming Creature! would not she tempt the best Lord in the Land to run away with her!" (PA, 107). Mrs. Jewkes justifies Mr. B.'s ignominious actions by calling attention to Pamela's desirability. Later, in the carriage ride to Lincolnshire, Pamela reports that Mrs. Jewkes sat next to her, "squeezing my Hand, and saying, Why you are very pretty, my silent Dear! and once she offer'd to kiss me. But I said, I don't like this Sort of Carriage, Mrs. Jewkes; it is not like two Persons...

In this dissertation, I argue for a renewed approach to realist texts that rely on conventional perspective and minor characters in their representation of intellectually disabled characters. While disability studies' concepts like narrative prosthesis and the normate have done essential work in arguing for the need for disability's representation from the perspective of the disabled, these ideologies have also negatively influenced the critical reception of texts that do not respond to this need in an immediate or obvious way. By offering new readings of novels with disabled characters whose representations have been frequently questioned, my aim is to complicate the critical bias that assumes the realist text will always negatively represent the disabled. Through new intepretations of several canonical texts—Willa Cather's My Ántonia, Charles Dickens's Barnaby Rudge, Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener," and Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent—I argue that certain realist authors represent disability through a complex and dialectical form of mimesis, what I theorize as the making of aesthetic nervousness. Rendering nervous the textual elements of perspective, characterization, and embodiment, the authors in this study remap the encounter between nondisabled and disabled, normal and abnormal experience, not by unfairly privileging the normate, but instead by developing transformative potential within it. Through their representations of disability, these realist texts reveal how the encounter with disability may involve an aesthetic nervousness that alters the formal conventions of the text, gesturing toward the need for them to be remade in such a way that considers how to integrate and represent the other. Redefining the determined experience of the normate as one that is more fluid and indeterminate, my readings of the realist text recast the nervousness of the nondisabled subject as a consciousness of a newly-formed ethic, one that demands witnessing the aesthetics of disability and consequently reimagining (and remaking) the conditions of narrative that ignore, misinterpret, or silence the disabled voice.

Held at Lancaster University's Centre for Research (CeDR) in June 2009, this seminar was first of a summer series designed to foster in-depth exploration of topics within Cultural and promote dialogue with other areas of research.1 A Tripartite Approach to Postcolonialism began with a keynote presentation by Dr. Clare Barker (University of Birmingham) and Prof. Stuart Murray (University of Leeds), guest editors of forthcoming special issue of JLCDS on postcolonialism. Their presentation, Literatures and Materiality of offered a survey of relationship between postcolonial scholarship and Studies, while also making a series of critical interventions. In particular, speakers stressed need for a close engagement with local conditions of production of text, arguing that transcultural applicability of key theories and concepts from Cultural cannot be assumed. For example, they suggested that David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder's seminal concept of narrative prosthesis- developed in Narrative Prosthesis: and Dependencies of Discourse (2000)-invites analysis focusing on metaphorical meaning of individual character, neglecting idea of community central to many postcolonial narratives. speakers also argued that issues of care and cure may function very differently in postcolonial texts. Offering brief readings of works from a range of postcolonial contexts (including texts by Salman Rushdie, Ben Okri, Sahar Khalifeh, Ngugi wa Thiong'o, and Patricia Grace), Literatures and Materiality of Disability made a compelling case for contribution can make to postcolonial scholarship, and vice-versa. As with best work in Cultural Studies, this presentation actively sought to advance our understanding of not one but two fields. Drawing on but not requiring familiarity with previous work by both speakers-particularly notion of autistic presence and argument that a shift in reading strategies is required when engaging with postcolonial texts2-their presentation successfully balanced conceptual sophistication with accessibility for those less familiar with postcolonial studies. Sparking most discussion during post-presentation question session was issue of metaphor. Among points raised were whether there is a difference between metaphor and metaphorization, and need to ask what a character communicates about disability before level of metaphor. In fact, while postcolonial texts may make issue of metaphor a particularly pressing one, metaphor has been keenly discussed at various recent events, suggesting that, in UK Cultural at least, it is a hot topic. This was illustrated in next presentation, Shifting Perspective, Heightening Awareness: Weaving Dialogues Between Postcolonial Theory and Studies by Ana B. Pereira, a postgraduate student at Lancaster University. Her paper drew out parallels between postcolonial theories and Studies, before offering an in-depth reading of a classic text in postcolonial theory, Frantz Fanon's The Fact of Blackness (included in 1952 collection Black Skin, White Masks). Noting extent to which imagery of impaired body is used in Fanon's essay-in terms reminiscent of, though without reference to, Mitchell and Snyder's writing on disability as the master trope of human disqualification (3)- she stressed importance of bearing in mind the existence of interlocking systems of oppression. In same panel, Beatriz Miranda-Galarza of University of Leeds presented a paper examining relationship of disability to postcolonial issues from a Latin American perspective. Drawing upon both fieldwork and personal experience, 'Between a will to write and a body to be written': Disability, history and things that West forgot to say was an invitation to rethink western historical and theoretical account of disability that, she argued, has disabled contribution of those from other milieus. …

REVIEWS race, class, and gender) in the processes through which the world is represented in order to be understood and controlled—these processes have never been out of play, and most certainly are very much in play in precisely the historical realm that has served to assert the contrary. Amid the intellectual wealth of this volume it seems greedy to ask for more, but I do wish for two things. First of all, I regret that the volume did not have room for the work of at least one social historian: a discussion of the malleable and continuously negotiated genealogical identities of the Welsh Marcher families, for example, would have contributed immensely to the book’s important presentation of the fluid categories of identity in border territories. I wish, too, that the book had not limited itself to the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, each of which, after all, has already staked claims to versions of modernity, the famous twelfth century renaissance for the one, and the equally famous collapse of the even more famous medieval synthesis for the other. Indeed certain tendencies in New Historicist criticism have already begun to push the border of modernity back to the fourteenth century and beyond and thus to saddle the early Middle Ages with all the theoretical work that used to be done by the Middle Ages as a whole. It seems to me now that it is very much time for a new examination of those early medieval centuries. Robert M. Stein Purchase College and Columbia University Edward I. Condren. Chaucer and the Energy of Creation. The Design and the Organization of the Canterbury Tales. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. Pp. viii, 296. $49.95. It is somewhat disconcerting to find this book opening with a sentence whose banality is further damned by defective punctuation: ‘‘What could be more medieval than the Canterbury Tales’’ (p. 1). Nor does the rest of the paragraph enable the reader to decide whether a question mark or an exclamation mark would best represent the author’s intention . A pity, because the weak beginning is followed by many passages of fine writing displaying Edward Condren’s mastery of the epigram: thus, his description of KnT as a ‘‘balanced ideal of passion and reason’’ 543 ................. 8972$$ CH21 11-01-10 12:23:12 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER (p.50), or his declaration that ‘‘Art often presents a brilliant alternative to life, but it never provides a substitute’’ (p. 112). Most of this volume is a straightforward critical discussion of CT that will prove stimulating to students, though there is little, other than Condren’s tripartite division, that will be new to scholars. The introduction , with two sections reflecting the title and subtitle (‘‘The Energy of Creation,’’ pp. 1–11, and ‘‘The Organization of the CT,’’ pp. 12–22), puts forward a number of thought-provoking ideas to explain the following division. The rest of the book is divided into three parts: part 1 examines Fragments 1 and 2 (the sequence of tales is that of the Riverside Chaucer); part 2, Fragments 3–5; and part 3, Fragments 6–10. Most tales are discussed in depth, with the exception of SNT and ManT (Fragment 8 is barely mentioned), but there is no conclusion to match the introduction, which would have rounded off the argument. Despite the almost universal opinion that this somewhat loose collection of tales was unfinished and incomplete at the time of the poet’s death, it is a significant element in Condren’s argument that Chaucer had gone as far as he wanted and written all he intended, that he put the stories into final order before adding the Retraction, and that the Ellesmere manuscript faithfully maintains Chaucer’s ordering of the tales. This is crucial, since Condren’s three divisions of CT, and his interpretation of their function, depend for their justification on this and no other order. Many will see this as a misguided attachment to a sequence that Chaucer may not have chosen, or may not have intended to be final; indeed, Condren himself thinks that ‘‘Chaucer was considering both arrangements’’ (p. 75). In spite of this, the author...

Medieval English Manuscripts:

Subverting the Monster

This is a collection of essays on the subject of lament in the medieval period, with a particular emphasis on parental grief. The analysis of texts about pain and grief is an increasingly important area in medieval studies, offering as it does a means of exploring the ways in which cultural meanings arise from loss and processes of mourning. The international scholars who come together to produce this volume discuss subjects as diverse as lament psalms in Old and Middle English, medieval Latin laments, mourning in Anglo-Saxon literature, mourning through objects, medieval art and archaeology, Old French poetic elegy, skaldic poetry, medieval women’s writing, Old Polish drama, English massacre plays, and Middle English nativity lyrics.

Efraim Lev and Zohar Amar, Practical materia medica of the medieval eastern Mediterranean according to the Cairo Genizah, Sir Henry Wellcome Asian Series, vol. 7, Leiden and Boston, Brill, 2008, pp. x, 619, €169.00, $237.00 (hardback 978-90-04-16120-7). - Volume 53 Issue 3

Some time between 1390 and his death in 1400, Chaucer served as a substitute forester in North Petherton, Somerset.1 Although it probably required little more than occasional desk work, and although it was the last and worst-documented of Chaucer's many dalliances with the administrative machinery of late-fourteenth-century England, the position affirms the persistence into the reign of Richard II of the decadent Norman royal forest system.2 While it is uncertain whether art imitated life or vice versa in each case, a number of Chaucer's literary works mention forestry and make use of its specialized vocabulary.3 In the Book of the Duchess, for example, the poet employs a slew of technical terms over the course of Octavian's hunt (344–86).4 The Knight's Yeoman and (as will be shown) the Friar's Tale's devil-yeoman are especially important in the present connection because they are foresters, albeit of a more practical variety than the historical Chaucer. In what follows, it is argued that the Friar's Tale, by a series of dramatic ironies, critiques the royal forest system in which Chaucer was (or was to become) a minor official. The first section outlines fourteenth-century English forest history and its reception in poetry of the period; the second presents a reading of the Friar's Tale, with special attention to the figure of the devil-yeoman and the tale's satire on the royal forest and other administrative systems.As the Crown's economic stranglehold on lands designated “forest” weakened toward the end of the fourteenth century, the English nobles grew bolder in cultivating local protocols for their woodlands, giving rise to a rich hunting culture that would come to symbolize the British leisure class. At the same time, the relaxing of royal forest law drove into the literary mainstream the figure of the tricksy forest outlaw, whose popular cognomen “Robin Hood” was to be the occasion for one of British literature's most successful fantasies.5 In addition to the historical convenience of a forester Chaucer, then, the thirty or so years of his literary career stand at the crossroads of the two great moments in medieval forest history: on the one hand, the final gasps of the Norman forest scheme; on the other, the appropriation of the hunt as an aristocratic prerogative. The convergence of the two moments in the late fourteenth century fostered an imagined English forestland, endlessly refashioned in tales and technical literature, in which the peasant, the outlaw, the forester, and the noble hunter meet and quarrel.6 Chaucer's forests, too, for all that they may seem a shamelessly exploited motif, provide a backdrop to characters who act out “the growing self-consciousness of the romance tradition.”7The last quarter of the fourteenth century witnessed a series of crises in and around the royal forest. As aristocratic as well as popular opposition to the Norman forest system grew keener, Richard and his deputies continued to cede forest rights to the barony in exchange for fealty, a trend that had gained momentum since John first began large-scale strategic disafforestment with his Great Charter of 1215.8 A tacit coalition sprang up between the Crown and the barony with respect to hunting rights, so that by the time of the Peasants' Revolt in 1381, it was the abolition of the hunting privileges of the elite, and not of the royal forest, which formed a part of the rebels' demands.9 On a number of occasions, the political controversy surrounding the Norman forest touched the historical Chaucer. John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster, for whom Chaucer wrote The Book of the Duchess, upon returning from Spain in 1389 found his dukedom split by a fierce dispute between denizens of Yorkshire and his forest officials, over hunting rights in his forests, parks, and chases there.10 In 1390, Chaucer was robbed of his horse and official monies by forest vagabonds at a place in Surrey referred to in court proceedings as “le fowle ok.”11 A third circumstance even more firmly implicates Chaucer in forest history and the history of hunting literature. In assuming the North Petherton forestership, Chaucer substituted for John of Gaunt's nephew, Edward of Norwich, 2nd Duke of York, who would later (ca. 1406–1413) pen medieval England's most ambitious hunting treatise, The Master of Game, a liberal Englishing of Gaston de Foix's Livre de Chasse.12 Nor was Edward unfamiliar with his successor's literary oeuvre. In the prologue to his manual, having humbly laid out the purpose of the work, he produces by way of an epigraph a couplet misremembered from Chaucer's prologue to the Legend of Good Women.13Chaucer's minor role in the decline of the Norman forest administration having been delineated, the forest setting in the Friar's Tale gains a new depth. For even if it was composed before his appointment to Petherton, Chaucer's reworking of the devil-and-advocate fable engages with the contemporary reality of the royal forest bureaucracy that would eventually draw him into its orbit. Neither the vaguely threatening groves of the Knight's Tale, nor the impromptu hunting zone of the Book of the Duchess, nor the flatly wrought “Forestes, parkes ful of wilde deer” (V 1190) imaged forth by the Franklin's Tale's magician, the forest of the Friar's Tale is composed to feel more historical—if less remarkable—to a contemporary audience, because the tale takes aim at foresters as well as summoners. To be sure, Chaucer's “grene-wode shawe” (III 1386) owes much to the romance tradition, but the Friar specifies at the beginning of his tale that the summoner was the wiliest chap “in Engelond” (III 1322), and that the archdeacon who supervised him “was dwellynge in my contree” (III 1301). Furthermore, the Friar's remarks in his Prologue and the Summoner's irate interruptions make clear to the pilgrims that the fable's true target is a flesh-and-blood summoner, opening the door for a second analogy between the Friar's summoner and an historical one. Finally, the use of technical terminology throughout the tale adds to the impression of historicity.14While Chaucer's trajectory in the literary-critical imagination from “court poet” to “city poet” has bypassed the natural world,15 recent scholarship has turned to his bureaucratic obligations more generally,16 and for good reason: the historical Chaucer could have boasted along with the Roman de la Rose's Fals-Semblant that “Trop sai bien mes abiz changier,Prendre l'un e l'autre estrangier:Or sui chevaliers, or sui moines,Or sui prelaz, or sui chanoines,Or sui clers, autre eure sui prestres,Or sui deciples, or sui maistres,Or chastelains, or forestiers;Briement je sui de touz mestiers.”(lines 11187–94)“I know well how to change my guises, pick up one and put down another: now I'm a knight, now I'm a monk, now I'm a prelate, now I'm a canon, now I'm a clerk, at another time I'm a priest, now I'm a disciple, now I'm a master, now a castellan, now a forester; in short, I do all the jobs.”17 In this extensive list of occupations, officials comprise a decided majority. Although, of course, Chaucer did not attain to all of these professions, his work as an esquire, a controller of customs, a clerk of works, a forester, and so on, doubtless contributed to the panoramic view of society famously explored in the frame narrative of the Canterbury Tales. Seven of Chaucer's pilgrims are officials in some capacity (the Friar, the Knight's Yeoman, the Man of Law, the Manciple, the Pardoner, the Reeve, and the Summoner). To some extent, Chaucer's diverse stints as a bureaucrat must have contributed to the timeliness and complexity of the Friar's Tale's satire on corrupt officialdom.18Given the importance of hunting and the royal forest in late-fourteenth-century English political history, it should not be surprising to find two foresters among Chaucer's creations.19 The pride of place granted to the Knight's Yeoman in the General Prologue testifies to a type and a profession indispensable for a complete “compaignye/Of sondry folk” (I 24–25).20 The Yeoman is outfitted with clothing and accoutrements proper to a gamekeeper, a private forester serving a lord. He certainly appears to be ready for whatever the woodlands throw at him. He wears a green coat and hood, and a brooch imprinted with an image of St. Christopher; he carries a bow and a sheaf of peacock arrows, a bracer, a sword, a small shield, a dagger, and a horn with a green shoulder-strap. One is assured that his aptitude is commensurate with his gear: he looks after his arrows “yemanly” (I 106), and “Of wodecraft wel koude he al the usage” (I 110). The apparent approbation with which Chaucer the pilgrim pronounces these earthy words—“yemanly,” “wodecraft”—reflects the new aristocratic associations of venery and forest husbandry. The implication is that only a very well-to-do knight possessed the means to retain a skilled forester to patrol his woodlands and serve as “master of game” on his hunts.21 While describing in his treatise the all-important “undoing” (disembowelment) of the slain deer, Edward of Norwich distinguishes the hunter's competence from that of the “woodman” along similar lines and in almost identical terms: But on þat oþir syde, if þe lorde woll haue þat dere vndone, he þat he byddeth, as byforn is seide, shuld vndone hym þe moste wodmanly and clenly þat he can. And ne wondreth ʒou noght þat I say wodmanly, for it is a point þat longeth to a wodmanes craft; and þough it be wele fittyng to ane hunter for to kunne done it, neuerþelatter it longeth more to wodmancraft þan to hunters. And þerfore, as of þe manere how he shuld be vndo, I passe ouere lyghtly, for þer nys no wodman ne good hunter in Englonde þat þei ne can do it wele inow, and wele bettir þan I can tech hem.22 Thus the byzantine legal infrastructure governing the foresta regis and the forestarii regis, which had reached its zenith with Henry II's 1184 Assize of the Forest, has been transmuted by Chaucer's time into a complex aristocratic craft predicated on a technical protocol. The admirable competency exhibited by the Yeoman is yeomanry itself, the sum of the duties a forester performed for his lord. Chaucer rounds out the description of the Yeoman with the wry observation that “A forster was he, soothly, as I gesse” (I 117), as though it needed saying. The irony detectable in this line demonstrates the fourteenth-century forester's ready recognizability in literature, at least in ideal terms. For if the symbolical tidiness with which the Yeoman makes his entrance is fueled by anxieties about the practical problem of distinguishing between foresters, outlaws, and locals in England's woodlands, Chaucer's portrait shows, at the very least, how a forester ought to appear.Aside from the ominous “frenges blake” that adorn his hat, the devil-yeoman of the Friar's Tale is a perfect miniature of the Knight's Yeoman, right down to his “gay” comportment and his “arwes brighte and kene”: And happed that he saugh bifore hym rydeA gay yeman, under a forest syde.A bowe he bar, and arwes brighte and kene;He hadde upon a courtepy of grene,An hat upon his heed with frenges blake.(III 1379–83) Green trappings are stock symbols of forest-goers, and so they need not indicate any specific connection between the two characters, beyond the typological one explored below.23 While critics have noted the devil's similarity toRobin Hood24 and to a hunter,25 the ensuing conversation between the yeoman and the summoner makes clear that the devil is posing as a “bailly” (official), a fact acknowledged more than once by both characters (III 1396, 1419, 1427–28, etc.). Clad in green and mounted, the demon most closely resembles the type of middling forest official known as a “riding forester.”26 It makes sense that a devil should impersonate an official in a tale devoted to: (1) the proper execution of an office; (2) the temptation to embezzle; (3) lordship and servitude; (4) economies infernal, divine, and human; and (5) “the ultimate justice of the social dispensation.”27 Rather than providing a colorless foil for the summoner's comeuppance, the devil's disguise adds its own specific layers of irony to the tale's moral.28 By dressing the devil as a forester—a departure from all known sources and analogues—Chaucer pits one “bailly” against another, elaborating a critique of administration that subtly reshapes the conceit of the devil-and-advocate fable.The primary ironic effect of the devil's trappings is the implicit comparison of foresters to devils. Read as a forester, the demon takes on the aspect of an official supervising his domain, as he inquires after the summoner's itinerary with perhaps more than friendly interest: “‘Wher rydestow, under this grene-wode shawe?’/Seyde this yeman, ‘Wiltow fer to day?’” (III 1386–87). At the same time, this is also Satan's minister watching for his moment to snatch away a sinner. When the devil lists for the summoner's edification the disguises available to demons (“Somtyme lyk a man, or lyk an ape,/Or lyk an angel kan I ryde or go” [III 1464–65]), he not only intones the superficiality of fleshly existence, but defines the contours of an administrative program.29 The summoner's downfall lies in his inability to pierce the superficial reality by correctly identifying in the forester's garb the signposts of demonhood: the black-fringed hat, the green gear, the residence “fer in the north contree” (III 1413).30 Crucially, both levels of reality represented by the devil-yeoman contain an administrative system (the royal forest and the administration of heaven and hell), and the summoner worsts the green-clad stranger in both of them, to his mortal peril. While attempting to impress a forester, the summoner proves crueler than a devil.Congruent with the irony that the summoner is crueler than a devil is the irony that he is crueler than a forester. Foresters' reputation for abuses of power had its roots in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the heyday of the forest regime in England. In 1279 the denizens of Somerset forest, where Chaucer was to hold his forestership, made so bold as to bring an action against their local forest deputies for official malfeasance.31 The form of their complaint is similar to accounts of corrupt clerical officials in the century to follow, and the Somerset foresters' alleged abuses resemble nothing so much as the Friar's summoner's “purchasyng” (III 1449): they leverage privileges against their own profit, they extort on pain of frivolous litigation, they steal outright. By the fourteenth century, the ponderous machinery of the kingdom-wide Forest Eyre had given way to ad hoc commissions of oyer et terminer and sporadic local “perambulations” to reaffirm the bounds of the forest.32 The rapid decline of the royal forest arrangement (including the desuetude of the forest courts in the early fourteenth century) accounts for the lack of similar formal complaints during Chaucer's lifetime. As the scale of corruption in the forest system shrank along with the royal forest itself toward the end of the fourteenth century, the figure of the corrupt forester hardened into a literary trope. At the same time, many other administrative systems—for example, the ecclesiastical courts that summoners served—were growing in power and complexity. Thus the Friar's Tale juxtaposes an old problem official with a new one, implying an analogy between the two.33The third irony arises from the summoner's incorrect assumption that a forester must be as evil as he himself is. As the Friar explains at the beginning of his tale, the summoner's vices flourish because of his relatively unsupervised position in a bureaucracy (“His maister knew nat alwey what he wan” [III 1345])—superadded to which, one might say, is the personal hatefulness that sends this particular summoner to hell. But the most immediate cause of the summoner's predicament is his overestimation of the forester's corruption. His dumbfounded reply to the devil's revelation of his true identity (“I wende ye were a yeman trewely./Ye han a mannes shap as wel as I” [III 1457–58]) signifies not only ‘I thought you were a young man: a person, like me,’ but also ‘I thought you were a bailiff: you look just like me.’ Under the first interpretation, the summoner is shocked to learn that the stranger is not of this world; but, as critics of the tale often note, his subsequent behavior suggests that he continues to mistake the demon for a mortal. Under the second interpretation, he is shocked to learn that the stranger is not a corrupt official, a partner in crime, as he had presumed. Because the devil-yeoman's account of his infernal duties so closely resembles the stereotype of the corrupt forester, the summoner fails to grasp the superficiality of the disguise. His demonological inquiries reveal that he understands “feend” (III 1448) as an exotic subgenre of the term bailly, and his primary interest in the discussion is to glean “[s]om subtiltee” (III 1420) that he can apply to his own endeavors. The first question he puts to the yeoman (“Han ye a figure thanne determinat/In helle, ther ye been in youre estat?” [III 1459–60]) reveals a mind working to incorporate new information into a familiar system, to subsume demondom in the same estates typology that comprehends summoners and foresters. Later, the devil makes his most explicit threat on the summoner's soul, and the summoner responds with at the of with his by in a of this than he was on ryde I with it be so that this nat a yeman, is ful The summoner's his to the forester's by his yeman and it also his of the with the he to mistake the for the for implicit in the of the tale, but is made explicit to the by the Friar's opening description of the is the specific into which the devil At a time the of the royal forest administration was very much on the would have the irony that the summoner fails to for the of a forester less corrupt than he, and to himself a term for a forest official. Chaucer the of yeman to point up the summoner's between the forest system and the infernal of which the devil-yeoman is a means of these ironies, the tale pits against one another two of In to the Chaucer the devil in an to the summoner's in its position its administrative The specific of a forester on the of this in the fourteenth century, and in the literary of same that whom Richard and as a of the of a new type of literary with to the forest, by rapid disafforestment and the of forest throughout the fourteenth In the Friar's Tale a similar type of is a for the Friar's on To his I nat been out of his han of no of is the point that so the His so been of the the out of [III not only to the Friar's of with of his but also to the of his By rights, a summoner ought to serve the of his in of the and may his the Friar a system at all levels by the down his in the of their and their the two pilgrims in a about and beyond the question of the of which of course, they also continues his of into his own The Summoner's is all a in his proper the he had in his [III His is by his and (III that of official at for the the and him a a with the of in upon diverse manere many a I the The Summoner's is where the Friar's summoner is The formal over the of the the Summoner's a of his own the of that has the place of bureaucratic the Friar's tale with over Chaucer the for the between the summoner and the forester. Although the satire in the disguise of a about the role of the fourteenth-century forest the tale's of the is The devil's that been ful and ful is to and is ful and perhaps official in the forest. or not the from the poet Friar's Tale may well have been composed before historical Chaucer could have the reputation of the he during the last of his When the devil on to the summoner that by I I al that by or by to I al my he the stereotype of the corrupt forester, and his own As it the devil will need no or to of the summoner's in all this very the demon with an His on (III not found in any of the tale, on and its could be as one is to that he has to means at other and under other his of corruption in comparison with the summoner's in the of an the devil an important in the as he been to his (III as the devil's the summoner's by so both of the corrupt forester the in the of forest history and the rise of bureaucracy in England, the summoner's about demondom a growing contemporary with the Friar's Tale a of the of the devil-and-advocate the summoner's to his on a it a departure from the of good and As in the tale's sources and Chaucer's devil not or his respect for him as an By the devil as a forest official, Chaucer one than his sources in an administrative than a for the The devil's as demon and yeoman a comparison between and and if Chaucer to or to have his Friar that clerical administration by its the irony of the royal forest as its reveals the outlines of a much more critique of When the devil-yeoman the summoner to of (III Chaucer not only makes clear the Friar's point that it is in the of the that han (III he also for his the narrative of on the to and for a working of the and infernal that takes the form of an and in whose image is to its

Writing primarily for an audience of medievalists, in his brief afterword to the collection The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages, Fredric Jameson remarks: “Suffice it to say then that allegory, on my reading of it, is always intimately related to a crisis in representation, and that the medieval period is an extraordinary laboratory in which to witness its elaborations.”1 Almost a decade later, in his Allegory and Ideology, Jameson expands on and thus clarifies these remarks. Moving across time and space, from late antique biblical hermeneutics to twenty-first-century world literature, he shows the relevance of this seemingly archaic form to modernity and its crises of representation. For Jameson, allegory—as opposed to allegoresis and symbolic interpretation—promises hermeneutic simplicity and unitary meaning but delivers multiplicity and disruption: I tend to feel that allegory raises its head as a solution when beneath this or that seemingly stable or unified reality the tectonic plates of deeper contradictory levels of the Real shift and grate ominously against one another and demand a representation, or at least an acknowledgment, they are unable to find in the Schein or illusory surfaces of existential or social life. Allegory does not reunify those incommensurable forces, but it sets them in relationship with one another in a way which, as with all art, all aesthetic experience, can lead alternately to ideological comfort or the restless anxieties of a more expansive knowledge.2Jameson’s electrifying remarks capture the discordance inherent to medieval allegorical narrative, to those works that extend the possibility of hermeneutic fixity but, as they disperse into shards and fragments before the reader’s eyes, ultimately show this fixity to be illusory. Within the context of English poetry, this experience of reading premodern allegory, frustrating yet intoxicating, registers perhaps most intensely in William Langland’s Piers Plowman, a fourteenth-century dream vision.This is a poem famously difficult to summarize, one whose various episodes, discontinuous rather than progressive, never seem to cohere into a narrative whole.3Piers Plowman follows its protagonist as he navigates an allegorical landscape in search of a spiritual truth that remains, time and again, nebulous and elusive. In his quest, he encounters—indeed, often verbally spars with—a lengthy catalog of personified abstractions that both aid and subvert his spiritual quest. These personifications are, for the most part, not unchangeable but pliable; they instantiate the “surreal, fluid, and confusing” design of Langlandian allegory.4 This poem’s disruptive form seems to endorse Jameson’s account of allegory and the “crisis in representation” that this mode of writing signals. Yet his account dismisses the literary mode of poems like Piers Plowman: “We will find ourselves reverting again and again to this insight: that it is the disappearance of personification that signals the emergence of modernity.” For Jameson, the personifications of classical and medieval allegory reify an ethical binary of good and evil; they embody “fixed substances or passions” that often devolve “all the way to the caricatural or the stereotypical.”5In their second monographs, Katharine Breen and Nicolette Zeeman—respectively, professor of English at Northwestern and professor of medieval and Renaissance English at Cambridge—interrogate the plasticity of medieval personification instantiated in the allegorical experimentation of Piers Plowman and other works. Like Jameson, Breen and Zeeman recognize that the instability inherent to this mode of writing captures the incommensurable and otherwise unrepresentable forces that collide in our experience of the world. However, both medievalists also advance a forceful rebuke to Jameson’s account of personification as a stagnant form—a critique certainly unintended, given the books’ publication dates. Breen’s Machines of the Mind traces the formal and historical development of three traditions of personification that, as she argues throughout the book, are available to medieval authors: Prudentian, Platonic, and Aristotelian. She describes how each type of personification functions as a pliable and complex “engine of thought” that allows writers and readers to think through difficult questions (MM, 8). For instance, in one thirteenth-century poem, personified vices register how sinfulness constitutes a “collective rather than a purely individual” problem; thus the poem proposes “public policy,” rather than private penance, as a solution to social ills (MM, 248–49). The book’s final chapter then describes how these three types of personification all “rub shoulders” in Piers Plowman (MM, 232).Zeeman’s Arts of Disruption focuses closely on moments of allegorical and narrative disjuncture in Piers Plowman, such as those in which the logic of specific personifications comes undone: when their “names remain the same while their actions and words degenerate” (AD, 13). Zeeman’s account of allegory bears a striking resemblance to Jameson’s. This mode of writing is “slippery, contrastive, pugnacious, episodic, contradictory—and not always glossable” (AD, 15). The first three parts of the book describe the pliability and argumentative vigor of Langland’s personifications. They are changeable and hypocritical; they debate and rebuke each other with violent words and gestures. The fourth and fifth parts explore how, by drawing material from the psychosomaticism of Galenic medicine and the unfulfilled quests of grail romance, Langland gestures to the ultimate unknowability of Christian salvation. Moving in and out of Langland’s poem, Zeeman argues boldly that allegory makes meaning out of frictions between narrative structures and bodies of discourse.In years to come, Breen’s and Zeeman’s insightful readings of Piers Plowman and other premodern works will transform the concepts and categories with which scholars in medieval studies talk about allegory. Certainly, medievalists are the primary intended audience for both books. This is especially true of Zeeman’s dense book, evidently written for a narrow community of readers intimately acquainted with Langland’s poem and its critical tradition; summary and context are often scant. Engaging in what Piers Plowman criticism calls “crux-busting,” Zeeman treats the poem as a constellation of enigmas that begs to be solved; she both grapples with and celebrates the poem’s many knots and slippages.6 To a degree, the last chapter in Breen’s book engages in a similar critical mode. She deploys her tripartite theory of personification to explicate the strange behaviors (and, in one especially brilliant case, gender fluidity) of Langland’s allegorical characters. Most of these enigmas—Why does Piers tear the pardon? What do Hawkyn’s tears signify? Why does Piers welcome Hunger into the half acre?—will probably mean little to those readers who do not already eagerly await the annual publication of the Yearbook of Langland Studies. Breen’s and Zeeman’s insightful responses will certainly provide medievalists with those “aha” moments that the best scholarship on Piers Plowman affords. They will also, most likely, spark fierce debates in conferences and specialized journals. For instance, I would reject Zeeman’s conclusion that Hawkyn’s tears signify “a kind of hope” and asseverate instead that they mobilize a critique of unthinking devotional formalism, of just going through the motions (AD, 177). In fact, Zeeman recognizes that the poem voices this worry throughout.However, these two monographs also speak beyond the disciplinary bounds of medieval studies. Breen and Zeeman stake a claim—a claim, for the most part, explicit in the former’s work and implicit in the latter’s—that personification allegory is not an “archaic or archaizing form” symptomatic of a premodern naïveté and designed for pedagogical ease (MM, 9). In their critical imagination, the alterity of the past, with its strange forms and genres, speaks to the concerns and crises of representation of modernity. My account of these books thus aims to expose those analytical moments that disclose the transhistorical vitality of medieval allegory, moments that, throughout both books, are interlaced with rigorous, historically situated engagements with medieval thought.Similar questions animate these two books: How and why do personifications in medieval allegory change? What are the cognitive, ethical, and social affordances of these fluid forms? How does medieval allegory make meaning? However, to answer these questions, Breen and Zeeman employ markedly different methodologies; I find such distinctiveness to be evidence of the rich and varied forms that the writing of literary history can embody. Piers Plowman is the indubitable gravitational center of Zeeman’s monograph. She begins not with the tradition that produced the poem but with the literary and philosophical logic of the work of art itself. After a brief introduction that describes “narrative disruption” as the “stuff of medieval allegorical narrative,” Zeeman plunges her reader straight into the poem’s muddy yet invigorating waters (AD, 15). The animating logic of this singular poem both illuminates and is illuminated by a rich corpus of medieval literature, philosophy, rhetoric, and theology. Zeeman thus continues the critical project of her first book, “Piers Plowman” and the Medieval Discourse of Desire, which explores how the poem’s many moments of “failure, rebuke, and renewal” participate in and disclose a broader history of medieval psychology. In Zeeman’s critical imagination, citations, allusions, and mere resonances assemble into a vibrant network of premodern thought, which constellates around Langland’s poem. Consequently, Zeeman’s footnotes are comprehensive, reminiscent sometimes of a commentary. Most of the author’s claims are supported by and contextualized in a mosaic of premodern sources and modern criticism. The critical pleasure that Zeeman’s work affords is thus not dissimilar to the pleasure of Langland’s poem: a poem that seems to refuse linear reading and that, rife with manifold allusions and biblical and patristic citations, provides the thrill of recognition and documentation.Zeeman’s book is theoretically sophisticated. Moving across this lengthy text, the reader can infer how schools of thought such as deconstruction and psychoanalysis inform her readings of medieval literature and philosophy. However, in contrast to her first book, Zeeman’s theoretical allegiances rarely make it to the body of her text. At times, ripples do form on the surface. It is clear, indeed, that much of Zeeman’s account of allegory as a disruptive art draws from Walter Benjamin’s suggestion that the “fragmentary” nature of allegory denies “the false appearance of totality” (AD, 9).7 At one point, she winks at her reader and suggests that “Langland’s narrator may have discovered the death drive” (AD, 297). A different book could have begun with an extended account of Freudian psychoanalysis and, slowly over the course of a chapter, outlined what it tells us about medieval culture. But Zeeman does not apply modern theory to premodern texts. Rather, as this nod to Freud suggests, she implies that aspects of medieval thought anticipate and thus illuminate modernity’s tools of inquiry. Zeeman’s tactical engagement with modern theory foregrounds the intellectual intricacy of the medieval text; it becomes not the object of theory but theoretical in itself.8In contrast to Zeeman, Breen does not begin with Piers Plowman. Instead, she writes a prehistory to this poem, recuperating and exploring in meticulous detail those moments in intellectual and literary history that made such a poem possible in the first place. Still, although she does not focus on the poem until her book’s final chapter, Piers Plowman is an absent presence throughout. As Breen’s book unfolds, the history of allegory teaches us how to read Piers Plowman. However, one can also sense that the allegorical experimentation of Piers Plowman taught Breen how to read this history. Moreover, unlike in Arts of Disruption, the argumentative animus of Machines of the Mind emerges, in great part, from extensive engagement with twentieth-century criticism. To isolate those rhetorical techniques and modes of thought that produced Langlandian allegory, Breen’s introduction confidently declares that modern criticism has misunderstood medieval personification. What follows is a dazzling rewriting of literary history that emphasizes the complex cognitive and ethical affordances of these strange, seemingly arcane forms. In response to critics as influential as Erich Auerbach, Angus Fletcher, and Gordon Teskey, Breen rejects that personification commits depersonalizing violence against individual subjectivity. Rather, this pliable rhetorical tool, insofar as it represents “a body of data as a human body,” negotiates relationships between individuals and collectives (MM, 2).In this rich introduction, Breen also challenges scholarship that attaches personification allegory resolutely to a particular philosophical school. This genre, Breen explains, is neither inherently nominalist (it tells us that only particulars exist, as advanced by Paul de Man) nor inherently realist (it tells us that only universals exist, as advanced by Johan Huizinga). In fact, personification allegory is “not inherently anything” (MM, 315). De Man’s idiosyncratic attachment to nominalism notwithstanding, Breen’s introduction begins to advance a line of argumentation that traverses most of her book: critics typically assume that medieval personifications embody Platonic universals or Forms, unchanging and stable. For Breen, this Platonizing tendency has led critics to recognize fluid personifications in Piers Plowman and other works as somehow deficient. At this point, Breen’s iconoclastic argumentation falters slightly. Indeed, some of the smartest work on Piers Plowman as early as the mid-twentieth century recognizes the poem’s allegorical fluidity, unattached to a Platonist formalism.9 To my eye, even one of the main objects of Breen’s critique—Jill Mann’s contribution to the Cambridge Companion to “Piers Plowman,” cited recurringly throughout the book—does not advance such a rigid account of personification. Although she does call personification “Platonizing,” Mann does not quite construct a rigid philosophical schema from which all personifications emerge. Rather, she argues that, insofar as it captures the real existence of abstractions, this literary genre is no mere game. Like Platonism, it shows how ideas such as love and hate participate in the sensible world.10 Mann thus anticipates Breen’s claims that personification allegory has conceptual purchase on the social world. Indeed, Breen even acknowledges that, in an earlier essay unfettered by the pedagogical demands of a Cambridge Companion, Mann advances a more flexible account of personification reminiscent of her own category of Aristotelian personification (MM, 206).Breen’s vision of literary history is in no way dimmed by this oversimplification of the critical field. In her introduction, she demonstrates that personification allegory is not tied to particular philosophical positions, especially when the modes of inquiry of these bodies of premodern thought have been mediated and narrowed by modern criticism. Her wide-ranging critique also advances an important corrective to a great deal of historicist work in medieval literary studies that renders the literary epiphenomenal to its historical or intellectual context. Although as early as 1978 Russell Peck warned medievalists that Chaucer (and, I would add, Langland or Gower or any imaginative writer) “is not a logician, nor is he a systematic philosopher,” a great deal of scholarship still seeks to restrict imaginative literature to narrow philosophical viewpoints, in the process circumscribing the imaginative and theoretical work that the literary itself can effectuate, as well as erasing the dynamism of much medieval philosophy.11 Breen captures instead how imaginative literature participates in rather than merely reflects intellectual history, indeed often pushes its boundaries. Machines of the Mind thus avoids what as the of or in which and are against each an that is ultimately her book, Breen closely those early that scholarship to to historical context or to sources for In each chapter Breen a or of that think and, techniques of and their how and early medieval to as well as imaginative works in their own personified who are not of a ethical binary but inherently The first of the book to a poem often but personifications at the of and in they “a material and presence in and (MM, In the poem, personifications like and are not inherently through the of they a of and the reader to do This often the form of what Breen calls a a of gender through which personifications their (MM, In the second of the book in the of a Platonic a who is sometimes even (MM, as a changeable Breen scholarship that, to her this and actions and some in Arts of Disruption, Zeeman also writes a history of one systematic than For the most part, her focus on the actions and behaviors of particular allegorical not on the conceptual categories to which these In the first three parts of her book, Zeeman does the of Langlandian personification in rhetoric, and and it is that her contribution to the history of medieval personification and the plasticity of this form on Zeeman explores how the rhetorical of of as who embody and “the instability and of and (AD, To Jameson’s critique of these do not reify a ethical binary of and In fact, these make the reader to the and possibility of in and (AD, For Langland’s of advances a of an that, by the of the and to the of Christian of have both and to find a stable and perhaps unitary in a poem for its and In her own book, Zeeman celebrates recognition of the relationship between form and she neither nor rejects his more historicist claims about the poem’s Yet in her reading Zeeman the inherent to the rhetorical of which may a of the critique that in the like Breen’s Zeeman’s is inherently it also from a process of rhetorical Zeeman’s of the rhetorical of this form call to the of medieval personification. In her account of the and argumentative of personification Zeeman also emphasizes how this genre a or that aims to and concepts rather than to (AD, Her brief remarks about the imaginative and functions of personification to an about and that is to Breen’s In her of and Platonic Breen describes how these personifications from and complex of the personifications are rhetorical tools that in their readers (MM, In a Christian Platonic are not They are imaginative that a hermeneutics of that a and other personifications a of that think of as (MM, Although these forms conceptual purchase on the material they are in real and the of thought in these Breen continues to rebuke twentieth-century scholarship that emphasizes the pedagogical simplicity of premodern personification. the many Breen in Machines of the may be her and most resolutely In personification allegory, evidence of an realist unable to abstractions in (MM, For the personifications of medieval allegory to its their The of the medieval that suggests a medieval unable to the of that For this Breen’s of the literary in her account of the Platonic is Indeed, it from the work of her who in Middle English literature an of the literary from other modes of an that what it to and recognizes the of these works in the social work on the of personification allegory with the work of literary who have for and as concepts to the These are concepts that have been at least by of in literary history, as and to the Middle The work of these scholars challenges influential of literary history that as a historical indeed a historical first in the Breen speaks to similar For to read personification allegory is to read a and work of as well as to the complex cognitive that its world affords. She thus challenges a vision of literary history that the inherent of the of the modern to earlier literary modes for the world. As medievalists such as and have the of this type of critique beyond the critical relationship between premodern and modern After the logic that a Middle by premodern unable to from from similar not to the logic that, insofar as it the of the as a of intellectual literary that do not those as somehow indeed imaginative vigor of these personifications is perhaps most in Breen’s account of Aristotelian personification. This last in her tripartite personification the purchase that literature, insofar as it engages with reality and and complex modes of thought, can have on the social world. Breen two philosophical traditions the of nominalism universals concepts that in the human in dream like Piers Plowman, by the human as or enigmas that readers to think about in Langland’s poem the functions as a nominalist that readers think about the nature of the (MM, that from the of particulars to the of this personifications their from an of particular by they are for about the universals with which they are and, like Langland’s can detail (MM, in these Aristotelian personifications a literary form that purchase an complex social world (MM, This form into a that allows readers to think about and social questions (MM, in Piers Plowman the personified Hunger functions as an ethical thought that ultimately and readers to the conclusion that is not a of (MM, it is out of the multiplicity of the this type of Aristotelian personification becomes “the most literary form for the social of (MM, to this late medieval that their (MM, Although by Breen’s of the modern is She writing about produced in the Middle and expansive period against which modernity itself. Breen’s signals that modernity is a that the second half of the period that in social and structures the of the as Breen thus gestures to the theoretical and indeed of this To my eye, this signals the broader and transhistorical critical of this and, most of the premodern literary works that it contrast to Machines of the Arts of Disruption does not recognize the of personification allegory. Still, Zeeman does that allegory of and a linear narrative (AD, 15). These capture “the and of in the (AD, In she recognizes that the inherent to personification allegory captures a that and more modes of literary such as to the best in both and Piers Plowman, the of the quest, that be for the or truth an object of unfulfilled As in a personification debate that is rather than Zeeman does not provide her reader with the of unitary she in fact, that the poem does not these of salvation. Rather, Piers Plowman deploys the and disruptive work of and, in into the ultimate unknowability of (AD, and also in the often fluid of Zeeman’s monograph. At the of her Zeeman that has been a (AD, The of her reflects the of medieval spiritual In its of the book’s the that, for Zeeman, is inherent to allegory. To the book’s of is not In fact, it like a of in a publication landscape that the and more forms of Zeeman her as they to the of a to recognize across the Like the of Piers Plowman the argumentative of Zeeman’s book capture a its many parts collide and grate against each other but, any do not cohere into the illusory of unitary in her conclusion Zeeman also suggests that, to Breen’s three modes of these allegorical modes “rub against each and meaning out of their (AD, The and that to those spiritual that be in especially the of Zeeman’s remarks are Indeed, they at the of two critical to Piers Plowman: one that the poem as a narrative of and spiritual and one that emphasizes the poem’s and Still, this final at Zeeman has not to those moments in the in medieval thought more these allegorical modes in Although she begins to explore questions of her that Langland’s into the and of and extended Yet perhaps the is that any final at by feel of Machines of the Mind and Arts of Disruption to debates medieval and in the of Piers Plowman are My reading of these books has instead on their broader to literary history and to the history of Indeed, Breen and Zeeman boldly the of medieval these These two monographs thus participate in an important critical tradition that recognizes the of the Middle to critical theory as well as to the concepts and ills that in this does not apply seemingly theory to early it in the logic of medieval literature and the that the of modernity and its critical However, neither Breen nor Zeeman out to a of As literary they first and to the of or forms as well as to their books are, to a great of that poem that has most of their to the bodies of with which it and to the brilliant criticism that it has This is scholarship that, as it, emphasizes how the medieval work of art, moments of its and its their true our own in those that do not the of Piers Plowman but rather to other bodies of medieval thought, these two books can sometimes feel like They rather than critique a corpus of premodern literature, rhetoric, and philosophy. In they to the vibrant thought and alterity of a medieval that and as yet especially to and the of for their and I also and for and

Reviewed by: Hidden Treasures and Intercultural Encounters: Studies on East Syriac Christianity in China and Central Asia Matteo Nicolini-Zani Hidden Treasures and Intercultural Encounters: Studies on East Syriac Christianity in China and Central Asia. Edited by Dietmar W. Winkler and Li Tang. [Orientalia—patristica—oecumenica,Vol. 1.] (Münster–Vienna: Lit Verlag. 2009. Pp. iv, 395. €39,90 paperback. ISBN 978-3-643-50045-8.) In the last twenty years, research on the commonly mistermed “Nestorian” Christianity in central and eastern Asia has grown in Eastern and Western academic circles. New publications have resulted in a new approach that is based more on sources and a broader philological foundation, which can be truly regarded as a turning point in the history of research on East Syrian Christianity in Asia. The volume under review is the outcome of the second conference on “Research on the Church of the East in China and Central Asia” in 2006. It contains papers written by scholars from disciplines such as church history, [End Page 616] philology (Syriac, Turkic, Iranic, and Chinese), archaeology, and theology. It explores the subject of East Syrian Christianity from various perspectives. The volume is organized in four parts. The first part, on “Inscriptions” (pp. 13–132), contains current research on texts carved in stone from various geographical areas (Central Asia, Inner Mongolia, China). Particularly relevant in this section are essays on Syriac and Syro-Turkic inscriptions by Mark Dickens, Wassilios Klein, Kuvatbek Tabaldiev, Li Chonglin, and Niu Ruji. They give the original text, transliteration, translation, and a commentary of Christian gravestones found in Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzistan, Inner Mongolia, and Xinjiang (China), all dating from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Also worth mentioning is Li Tang’s preliminary study (text analysis, commentary, and translation) on the Chinese Christian inscription found in Luoyang in 2006 and dating from the ninth century. The second part deals briefly with “Manuscripts and Texts” (pp. 135–80). Among the three articles in this section, Max Deeg’s provocative essay invites scholars to consider the proper and improper ways to proceed in placing in their context the Chinese Christian documents of the Tang period (618–907). The third part, on “History” (pp. 183–334), is the richest and presents the evaluation and interpretation of various sources such as inscriptions, archaeological evidence, and texts coming from different regions of central and eastern Asia and dating back to various historical periods. Among the eleven essays contained in this section five concern Syriac Christianity in China and Korea during the first centuries of the second millennium: Pierre Marsone writes on the time when the Temple of the Cross at Fangshan was a “Christian Temple”; Maurizio Paolillo about King George, the thirteenth-century Christian chief of the Öngüt tribe; Li Tang on Christians of the Mongol (or, better, Mongolised Turkish) Naiman tribe and one of their princes, Küchlüg khan, as referred to in medieval sources; Yin Xiaoping on Christians in the Chinese region of Jiangnan during the Yuan dynasty (1272–1368); Alexander Toepel about Christians in Korea at the end of the thirteenth century. In addition, Matteo Nicolini-Zani shows how Jesuit missionaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries referred to Tang Christianity in their writings to further their own mission, and Chen Huaiyu investigates the textual and artistic encounter between East Syrian Christianity and Tantric Buddhism in medieval China and Tibet. The last part is devoted to “Liturgy and Arts” (pp. 337–92), with three articles exploring the fields of liturgical music and religious arts. Yan Xiaojing’s article, in particular, shows the interaction between Christian, Buddhist, and Daoist artistic patterns. Photographs of historical relics are inserted in some of the contributions. Regrettably, the volume is rather carelessly edited. The two editors note in their introduction that they were aware of the challenging work of editing [End Page 617] such a collection of diverse interdisciplinary scholarship. Nevertheless, the book is a unique collection of “hidden treasures” for all those who wish to know more about those fascinating and mostly neglected interreligious and intercultural exchanges in which Christianity was involved in its diffusion along the Silk Road for about one thousand years. Matteo Nicolini-Zani Monastero di Bose Magnano...

This article is based on unpublished materials from the collections of A.E. Presnyakov (St. Petersburg History Institute RAS Archive), I.M. Grevs (St. Petersburg Branch of RAS Archive), and O.A. Dobiash-Rozhdestvenskaya (Manuscripts Department of the Russian National Library). Despite the revolutionary events of 1917 and the abolition of academic degrees and ranks in 1918, the Medievalist training system established at the I.M. Grevs School worked and yielded results throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Medievalists were first concentrated in the Historical Institute at Petrograd University, then in the Leningrad branch of the RANION Institute of History, and finally, from 1934, in the Department of Medieval History at Leningrad University. The new institutions were adapting previous procedures for the education of scholars to the changed conditions, while the content of the training remained unchanged and focused on mastering the methods and techniques of historical research, the study of sources and the range of auxiliary historical disciplines. This was achieved through participation in seminars on reading and commenting on medieval sources (usually on the history of Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries), and by making reports on highly specialist subjects. Young researchers continued to see the debate (necessary to obtain the right to teach on universities) as a means of self-realisation and self-presentation, a way of entering science, especially in a situation where there was virtually no possibility of publication.

REVIEWS Langlandian scholarship is not famous for consensus. Far from being an exact science, paleography itself remains the domain of a small number of well-informed but opinionated experts. Benson and Blanchfield can expect much stern correction—which their Preface is generous enough to invite. Highly complicated and detailed assemblages of data are also prone to human error. Blanchfield conducted work on Sion College manuscript (now privately owned by Toshiyuki Takamiya) and the three Huntington Library manuscripts through the use of microfilms, which do not always yield the most reliable results. Marginal annotations are usually cramped scribbles, with an infuriating amount of abbreviation , and so their transcriptions will be open to numerous challenges. Even specialists do not agree, have second thoughts, change their minds. The scribe of the C-text manuscript Huntington HM 137 from the late fourteenth century signed his name in the explicit, for example, but even the long-persevering editor George Russell cannot finally decide whether to read the name as Thomas Lancaster or Thomas Dancaster. While Chaucer scholars have long profited from the information assembled by John M. Manly and Edith Rickert in the first volume of their monumental Text of the Canterbury Tales (1940) supplemented in recent years by M. C. Seymour’s two-volume Catalogue of Chaucer Manuscripts (1995–97), this first-ever volume of The Manuscripts of Piers Plowman serves as a landmark undertaking that will encourage wider initial access to these historical materials and better understanding of their uses for literary studies. John M. Bowers University of Nevada, Las Vegas Robert Boenig and Kathleen Davis, eds. Manuscript, Narrative, Lexicon: Essays on Literary and Cultural Transmission in Honor of Whitney F. Bolton. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2000. 261 pp. $44.50 This collection of eleven essays by colleagues and former students of Whitney F. Bolton provides a kind of road map to that scholar’s diverse interests over the course of a venerable career of teaching and research. 371 ................. 9680$$ CH16 11-01-10 12:36:51 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER A quick look at the list of Bolton’s publications in the Appendix is helpful before reading the contents proper, because it is apparently the categories of Bolton’s own writings which lent the editors direction in choosing work to fill these pages. Bolton’s publications are grouped as follows: ‘‘Old English and Old Norse Literature’’; ‘‘Chaucer and Middle English’’; ‘‘Medieval Latin’’; ‘‘Later English Literature’’; ‘‘English Language ’’; and ‘‘Computer Applications.’’ These are the concerns which stand behind the four divisions of the table of contents, and the scholarship assembled within each. Of particular interest to Chaucerians are essays in Part 1, and one essay in Part 3. In ‘‘Part 1: Transmissions between Manuscripts and across Genres’’ are five essays, one each by Susan Crane, Malcolm Andrew, Andrew Welsh, Robert Boenig, and Lord Morris of Castlemorris (Brian Robert Morris). Crane, Welsh, and Boenig all write about Chaucer, in one capacity or another; Andrew’s focus is the poem Patience; and Lord Morris examines Wagner’s use (or perhaps abuse) of Measure for Measure. Of the first three, Crane’s study (‘‘Duxworth Redux: The Paris Manuscript of the Canterbury Tales’’) is the least about Chaucer per se, but obviously, in its attention to detail and its carefully supported iconoclasm, it has a place alongside Bolton’s own work. Crane returns for a fresh look at the question of editorial responsibility in the Paris manuscript. After a thoughtful reconsideration of published scholarly opinion on the matter, she rejects predominant opinion to conclude that the idiosyncratic emendations made to Chaucer’s text in the Paris manuscript present the decisions not of its owner, Jean d’Orleans, Comte d’Angoulême, but rather of John Duxworth, copyist of the Paris Canterbury Tales and of a Dialogue of St. Anselm also belonging to Jean d’Angoulême. Both manuscripts bear Duxworth’s signature. Crane’s treatment of preceding scholarship and the evidence of the manuscript are even-handed and convincing. Readers will be particularly interested in her two primary conclusions (and ought perhaps to heed the careful note of admonition on which she ends): ‘‘John Duxworth is . . . typical of the early Canterbury Tales scribes in...

The aim of this paper is a critical interpretation of the career of sisters Josefa and Růžena Blažek (1878–1922), who became famous as the “conjoined twins” Blažek in the American and European mass entertainment industry at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Drawing from contemporary critical disability studies discourse, the analysis is aimed at the construction of the “different” body of Blažek sisters in various representations, such as newspaper accounts and photography. Throughout the essay, the process of ascribing meanings to the bodies of Blazek sisters is observed, focusing on the ways in which the “different” body could be used as metaphor figuring in the debates about the “collective body” of the Czech nation. Using the intersectional approach, the essay interrogates the interplay between the imaginations of a “different” body and the notions of “white”, non/normative femininity, maternity and sexuality at the time. The paper demonstrates the interconnectedness of certain notions of normative class-specific femininity and family life with the notion of a harmonious national community, showing the discursive context of this connection in the nationalist bio-political discourses. Finally, the double-figure of the Blažek sisters is presented as a “narrative prosthesis” pleading for national unity in the troubling context of the early 20th century national politics.