As the Introduction to this important new collection indicates, its twenty-five chapters are aimed primarily at students taking courses in Old and Middle English literature, and it is intended that the remarks of the leading scholars here assembled should constitute a range of ways for the beginner into reading a body of literature whose attitudes and contexts may appear "alien at first glance" (1). Each piece addresses a text or group of texts that can be considered representative of a genre, aiming to evaluate their characteristics and the major relevant scholarly concerns, and "reading strategies are proposed to highlight particular methods and approaches of understanding the nature, form, and function of the texts (1) that can be applied by students more broadly in their encounters with early English literature." The different essays in fact interpret this broad remit in a wide variety of ways, some offering a handbook-style tour through the basics as their main raison d'être and pausing only briefly over some sample close reading, others (notably Conner's) eschewing full coverage in order to present ground-breaking new theories that absolute beginners will find more daunting; there are also some big (and highly canonical) texts that feature only very briefly, including The Canterbury Tales and Piers Plowman . But it is a measure of the success of this volume that its diverse approaches jostle along so well with one another, offering in sum a novel collection that presents students with a stimulating range of styles and types of critical introductions to a very broad body of literature. It is highly recommended.
The book begins with Elaine Treharne's scene-setting "The context of medieval literature," a pithy, concise survey of the main features of English literature during the period that includes enlightening comments on the types of literary production, and that explores the relationships between author and audience, and tradition and innovation. Eleven essays follow primarily concerned with aspects of Old English Literature. The first is Sarah Larratt Keefer's "Old English religious poetry," which introduces the parameters of its topic with a look at Cædmon's Hymn and a survey of the tradition before focussing on a detailed reading of (parts of) The Dream of the Rood and forms an interesting discussion out of the productive tension between heroic and Christian themes in the poem. In "The Old English elegy: a historicization," Patrick W. Conner offers a more specific study, treating only certain of the poems normally labelled "elegies" (primarily The Seafarer , plus The Wanderer , The Riming Poem and Resignation ) in order to advance the fascinating hypothesis that these texts should be read in the context of the "Exeter burial guild" statutes in BL Cotton Tiberius B. v, and of the value their audience would place on "monastic capital;" this is an engrossing piece of close reading in the light of a particular context of reception. Jonathan Wilcox, in "Tell me what I am": the Old English riddles," then presents a readable and witty guide to the essentials of the Riddle genre and what makes it tick, with particular forays into the sexual "double entendre" variety and the formal effects enjoyed by riddling poets. Jill Frederick's "Warring with words: Cynewulf's Juliana " deftly introduces Anglo-Saxon hagiography via a close reading of Cynewulf's poem, especially in the light of battlefield imagery and the themes of flyting, siege, and the lord-thegn relationship. Rolf H. Bremmer Jr. is then set the task of introducing "Old English heroic literature," which he achieves through some helpful musing upon the nature of heroes in their Germanic context, moving via an examination of poetry with a Migration-age backdrop to a subtle discussion of the "heroic ethic" in Old English verse with a more contemporary setting. A highlight of the volume is then provided by Roy M. Liuzza: his "Beowulf : monuments, memory, history" is a compelling and elegant critical fly-past of this most complex (and most studied) of early English poems that focusses insightfully on issues of memory and fame, on the place of social paradigms and individual glory in a text that is nonetheless "haunted by images of destruction and forgetting" (97) and which in its language and manuscript context negotiates the "passage from older to newer ways of remembering, recording, and retrieving the past" (101).
Thomas A. Bredehoft's "History and memory in the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" is the next piece, providing a valuable introduction to the complex history of the Chronicle text(s) and going on to focus on one aspect of the continuity of expression provided by the description of events as "the greatest in memory" or "the greatest ever/in history." In "The persuasive power of Alfredian prose," Nicole Guenther Discenza introduces Alfred's literary programme, and gives a close reading of the Preface to his translation of the Pastoral Care (in the light of its treatment of history, the theme of wealth vs. wisdom, its rhetorical strategies, and so forth). Less canonical fare is surveyed in Thomas N. Hall's piece on "Old English religious prose: rhetorics of salvation and damnation:" Hall argues that the areas of doctrine that probably most gripped the average Anglo-Saxon were the eschatological, especially what befell the soul after death, and takes this as his cue for an enlightening tour of the major apocryphal sources of the period, featuring stories relating visions of death and judgement, heaven and hell and the Antichrist, in order to illustrate what he paints as the unequalled synthesis of materials in Old English homiletic writings. Stacy S. Klein ("Centralizing feminism in Anglo- Saxon literary studies: Elene , motherhood, and history") then supplies a fascinating introduction to the application of feminist literary theory to Old English verse, and aims in particular thereby to shed new light on "the myriad of gender stereotypes that have accrued to motherhood" (150); she focusses on Elene (with comparisons to other Old English literary presentations of women, and their contextualization in historical reality), to show that (151) "Cynewulf's account of motherhood both draws on and recasts the meanings typically assigned to mothering in Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry." The final chapter dedicated to Old English is then Thomas D. Hill's "Wise words: Old English sapiential poetry," which productively probes the definition of a 'sapiential" genre during the period and explores its background, suggesting ways of getting beyond the odd flavour many of these texts carry for a modern readership via a close reading of their contextual subtleties (with a focus on aspects of predestination in Solomon and Saturn II ).
The following chapter, the first of thirteen on Middle English texts, finds James H. Morey introducing "Middle English didactic literature," a fascinating approach to a corpus whose attitudes Morey suggests can be taken as underlying everything else in Middle English literature, and which culminates in a close reading of four passages (from The Book of Margery Kempe , Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , The Pricke of Conscience and Handlyng Synne ) with reference to how different types of bodies "enact and represent" Christ's suffering. Similarly enlightening is Denis Renevey's "Middle English writings for women: Ancrene Wisse ," which focuses on the representation of communities and social networks, the spaces these create and the constructions of subjectivity that they permit, in the famous guide for recluses. Another crucially important early Middle English text, La3amon's Brut , is the focus of the next piece, "The Middle English Brut chronicles," in which David F. Johnson probes La3amon's treatment of his main source (Wace's Roman de Brut ), particularly in the light of the important relationship it manifests between wisdom and the use of violence in the portrayal of kingship (especially that of Arthur). Peter J. Lucas's "Earlier verse romance" surveys the English romances of the pre-Ricardian period, with particular reference to the appropriation of the "Breton lay," focussing mainly on Sir Orfeo in order to explore its depiction of the bonds of love and loyalty (with some comparison to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight ). Another generic-sounding title, "Middle English debate literature," likewise gives Alan J. Fletcher the opportunity to home in on one particular representative (or, as he argues, perhaps not so representative) text, with its stimulating reading of The Owl and the Nightingale ; context is the focus here, as Fletcher deals in some detail with the circumstances of the poem's composition (advocating a date in the range 1272-84, and a clerical circle in Guildford), and ponders the issues thereby raised about the nature and social function of the text's dialectic. Another highlight of the volume comes next, in the shape of Mary Swan's "Religious writing by women:" this provides a useful introduction to (in particular) Revelations of Divine Love and The Book of Margery Kempe , including their nature as "mystical" texts and scholarly foci such as the tension between their authors' status as women and as spiritual authorities; but it is most notable for its exemplary, practical demonstration of close critical reading, with an eye on categories such as voice, vocabulary, syntax, etc., presented in such a way that beginning students will find exceptionally helpful.
The next chapter is the first to tackle one of the major canonical later fourteenth-century texts, as Michael W. Twomey takes on "The Gawain -poet": focussing on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight itself, Twomey carefully situates the work in its literary (and text-critical) context and examines its chivalric and religious themes from a variety of critical approaches, stressing the value of a close reading of its "rich and purposeful" language. Andrew Galloway's survey of "Middle English prologues" ranges more widely, in what is a compelling and learned meditation on the nature and role of the prologue in medieval English literature, classifying the genre into a series of types and commenting upon such issues as the competing claims of traditionality and originality in Chaucer and far beyond. Anne Marie D"Arcy next offers a similarly astute and helpful guide to "The Middle English lyrics," navigating the possible sub- classifications of a diverse and interesting genre the recognition in which of "religious" and 'secular" types is just the beginning, and exploring themes including images of nature and love, and of women, via close readings of poems including "I sing of a maiden," "Whanne ic se on Rode," and "Lenten is come with love to toune." A more restricted textual focus is the centrepiece of William A. Quinn's "Medieval dream visions: Chaucer's Book of the Duchess ," which usefully places Chaucer's early poem in the context of medieval dream vision/theory in general as well as that of existing scholarship, before presenting a detailed close reading of the text in order to suggest its therapeutic significance in a performative setting. In "Late romance: Malory and the Tale of Balin ," Ad Putter presents an adroit and highly illuminating reading of Malory's feeling for "adventure," exploring the art of his prose form as well as his engagement with generic convention and narrative structure, and commanding thereby a terrific grasp of how his writing works that gets at much broader issues including the nature of historical and romance texts in the Middle Ages. Nicola Royan's chapter on "Scottish Literature" concentrates on the period from Barbour's Bruce (1375) to the completion of Gavin Douglas's translation of the Aeneid (1513), introducing a diverse and interesting range of texts and styles and how these express their self-assurance as Scots, including readings of works by Douglas, Dunbar, Henryson and others. The final chapter is then Greg Walker's "Medieval drama: the Corpus Christi in York and Croxton," which approaches medieval English drama via a sensitive examination of two particular texts (the York Crucifixion and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament) in terms of their (rather different) interest in the body of Christ and the Eucharist, with an emphasis on affective piety and the plays" theatricality and ability to provoke humour.