Julia Boffey's Fifteenth-Century English Dream Visions makes available in an affordable paperback five Middle English texts rarely anthologized and seldom--never affordably--edited: John Lydgate's Temple of Glass , King James I of Scotland's The Kingis Quair , Charles of Orleans' Love's Renewal (so titled by Boffey [[1]]), the anonymous Assembly of Ladies , and John Skelton's Bouge of Court . Each text's introduction expertly sets the stage for its poem, providing some history for each named poet [[2]], a review of scholarship and primary debates (with ample bibliography), manuscript facts with textual notes, and student-friendly annotations balanced between the elementary (but necessary) and the erudite. Boffey's manageably-sized anthology can effectively serve both undergraduate and graduate students, providing accessibility for the former and extensive bibliography for the latter. Nevertheless, no matter the erudition the anthology incorporates, Boffey, a well-published Middle English manuscript expert, lets the poems speak for themselves with notes that illuminate fifteenth-century literary culture, explaining classical references, manuscript disagreements, allegory, popular song, and other formal and critical matters. The book is a model for small, genre-related and language-specific anthologies.
The five primary texts Boffey includes display a range of forms, style, and content. The poems vary in length, beginning with two of about 1400 lines (Temple of Glass and The Kingis Quair ), two of half that length (Love's Renewal and The Assembly of Ladies ), with the shortest text, The Bouge of Court of some 550 lines and the last chronologically, concluding the anthology.
The relative brevity of the texts, including Lydgate's (from a poet not known for his concision), allows for comparison among the works, an especially useful classroom exercise. Each text is, of course, interesting on its own terms. The first part of The Temple of Glass is a tissue of classical references, perhaps more per square line than even Chaucer's visions, while its "enigmatic models of closure" (7) let students grapple with medieval manuscript textuality: Boffey outlines, but does not include, alternative endings to Lydgate's poem, such as the 628-line "complaint" included in two of its seven manuscript exemplars. In addition, The Temple of Glass illustrates various formal features of Middle English poetics, in both line and stanza. The Kingis Quair brings to a reader's attention Middle English's diversity with its "Anglo-Scottish" dialect, and recent studies, as Boffey points out, highlight the poem as unusual for its "life writing" (91). Boffey provides a title, "Love's Renewal," for her next selection by Charles of Orleans, part of a much longer poetic sequence by the French and English poet. As a self-contained excerpt Love's Renewal shows the compendious nature of medieval verse, encouraging discussion about the stricture and looseness of Middle English poetry. The Assembly of Ladies , the only anonymous work, tantalizes with its question of female authorship, and The Bouge of Court uses personification allegory to treat the vagaries of court life. The courtly lexicon of this last vision shows the interpenetration of amorous and political diction, a feature characterizing Skelton's role as royal poet at the beginning of the Tudors' re-invigorated centralized court.
Boffey's general introduction to the volume discusses the dream vision as genre along with its Latin antecedents and French exemplars, then treats three concerns modern readers bring to these texts: the shape of courtly culture, the "woman question," and "readers and circulation." In her discussion of the "woman question," for instance, Boffey asserts that the five texts give "an unusually positive and sympathetic" (12) representation of women, while in her discussion of "readers and circulation" she tackles the issue of "popularity." Her five dream visions, thus contextualized, initiate students' literary understanding, treating who wrote, who read, and what they might know of prior secular or religious texts. Boffey's introduction leaves open to debate many issues the poems' readers face, not least of which are the conventionality and generic contours of the dream vision.
Boffey's paperback anthology treats dream vision as viable genre. The genre's major proponents--A.C. Spearing, Kathryn Lynch, J Stephen Russell, and Steven Kruger--join many other critics in Boffey's 14-page bibliography, with citations from the nineteenth century to just this side of the millennium. What Boffey calls the "liberating possibilities" (1) of dream visions accede to various critical approaches, including the psychoanalytic and historicist, as her references demonstrate. Dream visions can--not exclusively, but certainly effectively--engage students in scholarly debate about poetics, politics, philosophy, and psychology. One might even suggest that the dream vision is one of medieval studies' protean literary genres because it raises questions of voice, form, philosophy, and politics.
Because fifteenth century Middle English poets bank on intertextuality to pay their poetic debt to Chaucer, Boffey includes in her anthology's general introduction a sense of Chaucer's dream visions. Her poets' debt to Chaucer, along with her book's size and the length of its texts, makes her anthology a natural for a class to use alongside an edition of Chaucer's dream visions in order to make plain the literary issues fifteenth-century dream visions raise. The anticipated Norton critical edition of Chaucer's dream visions, edited by Kathryn Lynch, would well serve a class as companion to Boffey's edition. Reading could alternate between Chaucer's visions and the five in Boffey's anthology, especially since Boffey's notes indicate Chaucerian echoes and grapple with the shadow Chaucer casts over fifteenth-century literature. Such an exercise, contrasting Chaucer's and fifteenth-century visions, could thicken our students' senses of fifteenth-century English literature in new and productive ways.
David Lawton's groundbreaking article, "Dullness and the Fifteenth Century" [3], reframed the argument about fifteenth-century literature, and the terms of its discussion have become in the last two decades more sophisticated and telling, if not uniformly adulatory. Lydgate figures prominently in James Simpson's 2002 Reform and Cultural Revolution , volume 2 of the Oxford English Literary History . Lydgate's biographer Derek Pearsall, in a response to Simpson included in the Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies (Winter 2005)--an issue dedicated almost entirely to Simpson's book---asserts Lydgate's constant failure to live up to Chaucer's poetic example (31) despite the American northeast's "Lydgate enthusiasms" (30). As Pearsall said of Lydgate in his own 1999 anthology Chaucer to Spenser :
"He [Lydgate] stands as a representative of nearly every important late medieval tradition of thinking and writing, and of the exhaustions, self-contradictions and transformations latent or potential in those traditions. Late medieval England can be understood through Lydgate--albeit in ways that Chaucer obliges us to unlearn" (343).
Boffey's handy anthology, in concert with Lynch's of Chaucer's visions, lets students read in tandem their Chaucer and Lydgate--and others, named and anonymous--to discover for themselves the merits of fifteenth-century literature.
Boffey's anthology, like Pearsall's (in quality if not in size), complicates any easy medieval-early modern divide. More importantly, it provides a ready, reliable, user-friendly teaching text, no matter the current enthusiasm for Lydgate or the current unfashionableness of genre-driven anthologies. Readers can become more confident in evaluating the literary significance of the dream vision and the conventionality of fifteenth-century poets through Boffey's edition of these five rarely-read poems.
NOTES
[[1]] Boffey has provided the title "Love's Renewal" for a narrative section of 84 ballades that she has excerpted from London, British Library MS Harley 682, "the single surviving copy of the sequence of English poems associated with Charles" (160).
[[2]] Perhaps a little more biography is warranted in the case of James I, author of Kingis Quair , whose 1437 murder, while mentioned as a final biographical detail, is left unexplained (90).
[[3]] English Literary History 54 (4) (Winter 1987): 761-99.