Jesse Gellrich's new book, like his previous The Idea of the Book in the Middle Ages, is an important contribution to our understanding of a particular late medieval mentality, in this case the oral mentality that continued, often unconsciously, to pervade fourteenth-century English thought despite the period's unprecedented engagement with written texts and literate modes of thought. Dense and closely argued, this book is likely to present some difficulty to those who do not share the author's wide-ranging expertise in several different areas of medieval English culture: historians of philosophy, literature, politics, theology, and historiography will all find themselves asked to venture outside their own disciplines, but all will find the effort to do so amply rewarded.
To some extent, this ground has already been well covered, and Gellrich makes no secret of his indebtedness to such predecessors as M. T. Clanchy (From Memory to Written Record) and especially Brian Stock (The Implications of Literacy). Indeed, the author's basic position, that "the power of language consists in displacement, the capacity of one mode of language to take the place of the other. . . . Writing is commonly masked as oral, and just as often spoken language is veiled as inscription . . ." (x), would be inconceivable without the massive scholarly investigation of medieval orality and literacy, and their interaction, that has occupied so many medievalists in the past twenty years. However, Discourse and Dominion may also be regarded as a corrective to a certain tendency in much of this recent scholarship to emphasize the development of literate habits of thought within an oral context (for recent examples, see Martin Irvine's The Making of Textual Culture and Stephen Justice's Writing and Rebellion). While recognizing the complex interplay of oral and literate modes of thought, Gellrich nevertheless swings the pendulum in the other direction, emphasizing instead the manner in which the oral mentality continued to dominate a highly literate culture.
The author divides his book into seven chapters: an introduction and six main chapters that are further divided into two-chapter sections, entitled "Philosophy," "Politics," and "Poetry." Chapter 1, the introduction, lays out the book's thesis in comprehensive fashion, arguing that "Language 'has' dominion when it becomes a kind of 'domain' or 'property' in its own right, held by a special few and protected by the class divisions of society. . . . Thus the decontextualizing possibility of language in the written channel is a potential threat or antibody in the system of controlling meaning and asserting power. At all costs writing must be construed as voice, if the status quo is to continue" (35). Some of the ways in which the linguistic dominion of voice continued to be asserted even through writing are the subjects of Parts One and Two.
Part One investigates the relationship between political philosophy and the philosophy of language in the work of two major fourteenth-century English thinkers, William of Ockham and John Wyclif. Chapter 2, on Ockham, makes a major contribution to the scholarship on this important figure in insisting that the political theories Ockham developed after leaving England in 1324 do not represent a complete change of philosophical focus, as is usually assumed, but rather continue the work on representation that characterized Ockham's earlier linguistic philosophy. Gellrich concludes that "even as Ockham questions the adequacy of linguistic and political repraesentata, he ultimately assumes that some signs are self-evident, that the mental term or concept will 'present itself' in differentiation from conventional language and that the ruler of this world (pope or king) will be self-evidently different from the source of power in the Godhead" (75). This emphasis on presence finally suggests that the traditional hierarchy in which writing is an inferior imitation of speech remains an unconscious aspect of Ockham's thought, despite his own avowals of their equivalence (77).
Chapter 3 takes up Wyclif's more "fundamentalist" philosophy of language, and its influence on his politics and theology, in terms of the notion of "displacement" mentioned above. Discussions of the Bible make it clear that this written document is nevertheless to be regarded as oral, ". . . Vox Dei, 'God's Voice'" (101). To some extent, then, Gellrich is able to deconstruct the opposition traditionally drawn by scholars between Wyclif's "realism" and Ockham's "nominalism": both turn out to be based on the priority of voice.
Part Two shifts the focus from philosophy and theology to politics and historiography in the reigns of Edward III and Richard II. Chapter 4, on the chronicle histories' depiction of the reign of Edward III, argues convincingly that "the voice of record is linked up with the dominium of the king: the 'word' of history is coordinated semiologically with the 'property rights' of monarchy" (127). Given the propagandistic aspects of these histories, they must claim a vocal "presence" despite their status as writing if they are to validate the king's claims to patrimony. Thus the chronicle histories "stage the problem between England and France as a chivalric contest arising from the breaking of a promise when the French 'usurper,' King Philip, seized the lands inherited by King Edward and the Prince of Wales" (134). The very need to do so, however, also attests to the weakening power of the spoken word (148).
Chapter 5 concerns not only the historical records of Richard II's reign, but the recorded political events themselves as well (especially the Peasants' Revolt of 1381, the conviction of Michael de la Pole in 1386, and the parliament of 1387), in terms of orality, literacy, and displacement. Gellrich concludes that "the upheavals in parliament and finally in the kingship itself were the direct result of the weakness of literacy, of the increasingly destabilized relation between written and spoken channels of language which were all too ready for seizure by the powers that be (190)," i.e. parliament; thus voice displaced even written legal precedent (191).
Parts One and Two, then, establish that, at least in the areas of philosophy, politics, and historiography, fourteenth-century England continued to be dominated by a discourse of voice as prior, even when it appears displaced in written form. Part Three, on the other hand, suggests that in the literary realm, poetic metalanguage allows a more thoroughgoing questioning and critique of this priority of voice. (This perception of poetry as a privileged site of escape from the dominant ideology follows the pattern established in The Idea of the Book, in which poetic language alone was seen as allowing an alternative perspective on late medieval culture, which was perceived as otherwise relatively monolithic). Chapter 6 is on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and argues that in this poem, writing displaces speech, rather than the other way around: the spoken word can become a mode of writing. For example, "Lady Bertilak's voice is a figure of literary language in this poem. . . . [H]er voice sanctions no control on the separation between rhetorical figure and syntactical sense, utterance and meaning. She is the soverayn who denies her own dominion" (218). Poetry thus offers a kind of "errancy of language" opposing the dominion of voice (224).
The seventh and final chapter analyzes Chaucer's Knight's Tale. Gellrich sees it as a reaction to the political problems of discourse and dominion discussed in Chapter 5. Theseus's language, in particular, is here read as sovereign, allowing no meanings other than his own, a view of language in which the Knight himself, as fictional narrator, is also implicated. Chaucer, on the other hand, defends the "writtenness" of his text, qualifying the "putative innocence of the relation between voice and letter" and thus "revealing that the benign gestures of the narrator leave an awful lot unsaid and unaccounted for" and delivering "a statement about sovereign discourse in the politics of his time" (271).
This summary does not begin to do justice to the subtlety and complexity of Gellrich's arguments, especially in the final chapter. Gellrich remains in the vanguard of theoretical discussions of medieval mentalities. Nevertheless, one cannot encounter such a thoughtful argument without engaging in some sort of dialogue with it; I offer the following observations in this spirit of dialogue rather than one of disagreement.
As mentioned above, Gellrich's focus in Parts One and Two is heavily on the hidden presence of the oral within a literate culture; in his view, only poetic language, as discussed in Part Three, offers an alternative, positive view of "writtenness." Such an emphasis is perhaps a necessary corrective to the emphasis on the textual and literate found in such earlier scholars as Stock and Clanchy, but this pendulum has surely not yet come to rest: Gellrich's own views, which might be regarded as painting too monolithic a picture of medieval orality, may themselves be subject to correction by such recent scholars as Irvine and Justice. Irvine, in particular, has argued convincingly for the overwhelming textuality of certain aspects of early medieval culture; it should be fascinating to see how he responds to Gellrich's challenge in his promised follow-up volume on the later Middle Ages.
It might be observed, for instance, that the categories of "oral" and "literate" are even more slippery than Gellrich at times allows. His discussions of rhetoric, for example, are used primarily to advance his argument for the primacy of the oral; in the chapter on the chronicle histories of Edward III's reign, for instance, Gellrich suggests that "To the extent that the propriety of telling the past was indebted to the oratorical skills of amplificatio, copia, and narratio, it witnesses the embedded orality within the written tradition that preserved them" (137). Rhetoric, to be sure, is associated with (oral) oratory; but its rules are preserved in a tradition of highly literate written texts, suggesting that Gellrich's embedded orality may itself conceal an even more deeply embedded literacy. The relation between speech and writing in this area is thus more complex than Gellrich allows.
Occasionally, too, the author seems to take certain historical texts too much at face value, for instance in using the admittedly propagandistic chronicles of the 1381 rising as evidence for the peasants' true mentality. One might also question Gellrich's terminology at certain points: why, for instance, is the speech of the Green Knight's severed head to be read as a figure of "disembodied language" (204)? Fragmentation and disembodiment are hardly the same thing.
Such observations, however, risk descending to the level of the quibble. More importantly, I have already marked the many passages in Discourse and Dominion that will be useful in my own current work. Gellrich's book is a major accomplishment, one that should prove challenging and beneficial to the many scholars studying the fields of orality and literacy, whether historians or literary and philosophical scholars. All of them should read it.