Patricia Meyer Spacks, Patricia A. Turner, and Karma Lochrie have shown that gossip--talk that insists on its own frivolity--can be a serious mode of resistance for marginalized groups. In Transforming Talk, Susan E. Phillips expands the scope of this paradigm, arguing that in late medieval English culture gossip posed a serious threat to and served as a powerful tool for authorities, by asking two provocative questions: 1) how did idle talk function in and structure medieval society, religious practice, and literature; and 2) how did the noun denoting spiritual kinship become the verb for trivial conversation. To answer these questions Phillips engages with a wide range of late-medieval writing--from sermon cycles to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to two anti-feminist texts printed by Wynkyn de Worde in the early sixteenth-century along with their French sources--and offers insightful, original readings that demonstrate how gossip served transgressive purposes in the Middle Ages and also productively influenced orthodox religious and literary practice.
After a short introduction, the book is divided into four chapters and a conclusion. The chapters divide the material both thematically and by genre: the first chapter investigates condemnations and appropriations of jangling in pastoral literature; the second and third discuss gossip's narrative potential and feminization in Chaucer's poetry and in William Dunbar's Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo; and the fourth highlights two non-canonical poems--the Fyftene Joyes of Maryage and the Gospelles of Dystaues--as etymological evidence that shows "how baptismal sponsors become the idle talk in which they engage" (11).
The first chapter, "'Janglynge in Cherche': Pastoral Practice and Idle Talk," maintains that gossip challenges ecclesiastical authority through the "jangling" (the Middle English term for gossip) of unruly congregations in church and, more intriguingly, through its contamination of pastoral practice, especially exemplum and confession. First, to show the dangers posed by idle talk in church, Phillips identifies the obsession that the anonymous author of Jacob's Wel had with taming his "congregation of inveterate gossips" (58). The preacher adapts exempla on everything from sloth to excommunication to assert the sinfulness of idle talk and, in doing so, compromises his pastoral efficacy, for he transparently manipulates these narratives and thereby limits their effectiveness as didactic tools. The chapter then argues that exempla and confessions prove susceptible to gossip because they require the recounting of narratives. Gossip traffics in the kinds of specific details that confession and exempla require to be productive. Thus, it "provides the model for the very pastoral tools designed to silence it" (15). Phillips demonstrates that anxiety about how exemplary practice can become idle talk pervades both orthodox and heterodox medieval culture, but her analysis of Robert Mannyng's Handlyng Synne most effectively shows how clerical reliance on exemplary narratives risks becoming idle chatter as the morals of Mannyng's exempla are often overwhelmed by "enticing narrative detail" (41). Confessional practice similarly can resemble gossip, and Philips' assertion that confessional exchange is narratively constructed challenges the frequently asserted view that medieval confessional practices gave rise to discourses of subjectivity and interiority. While Phillips does not reject the dominant view, she cautions us to remember that "this technology designed to produce truth is based on a technique for fabricating seeming truth" (56).
"Chaucerian Small Talk," the second chapter, takes as its starting point the idea that gossip can "transform official narrative and co- opt pastoral practices" and applies it to literary narratives, specifically Chaucer's House of Fame and Canterbury Tales (63). In Phillips' analysis, the House of Fame serves as Chaucer's ars poetica: while Chaucer acknowledges pastoral denunciations of gossip throughout the poem, especially its capacity to proliferate and distort, he appropriates those very features to "renegotiate" his relationship to literary authority (71). What the House of Fame discusses theoretically, the Canterbury Tales enacts, and Harry Bailly, the Host, becomes the vehicle whereby Chaucer puts theory into practice. The Host presents his tale- telling game to the pilgrims as a preventative to idle talk and then proceeds to interpret their tales in ways that allow him to gossip. For Phillips, the Host serves as the licensing muse for the Friar's, Summoner's, and Canon's Yeoman's ad hominem narrative attacks, but also as "a ribald and bourgeois St Paul who uses idle talk to interpret everything according to his doctrine" (99). In interpreting even a fabliau like the Merchant's Tale as an exemplum, the Host "troubles the distinction between amoral wit and exemplary wisdom," and allows Chaucer to interrogate the pastoral paradigm that draws univocal morals from complex narratives in the Melibee and the Physician's Tale (101). Thus, Chaucer appropriates gossip's capacity to multiply and transform old stories in the Canterbury Tales.
Chapter two concludes by considering the Wife of Bath as an arch- gossip and begins the book's focus on the gendering of gossip in the Middle Ages. Medieval and modern discussions alike generally assume that gossip is women's work, and Alisoun embodies that expectation. Phillips argues that "the Wife's mastery of gossip is less about the inability of women to keep secrets than about idle talk's potential for narrative transformation" (109). Indeed, her Prologue and Tale explicitly link idle talk and poetic practice. She manipulates both sacred and profane texts, transforming authoritative texts like Ovid's Metamorphoses into salacious gossip. Phillips's analysis stresses that the Wife of Bath reveals gossip's productive qualities by "creating new stories out of old texts and forging alliances between narrators and those who listen to them" (117).
The Wife of Bath further hints at gossip's productive potential when she describes her intimate conversations with her "gossyb dame Alys" as confession (119). "'Sisteris in Schrift': Gossip's Confessional Kinship," the third and shortest chapter, explores this potential in Chaucer's Shipman's Tale and William Dunbar's Tretis of the Tua Mariit Wemen and the Wedo. Both poems depict women who appropriate confessional conversation to establish kinship through words rather than through blood or marriage. Phillips argues that, in the Shipman's Tale, the wife's promise to reveal her marital secrets to the monk, Daun John, occasions their intimacy. Thus, the wife's appropriation of confessional speaking not only initiates sexual transgression but also permits a "reciprocal catharsis through which both parties could unburden themselves of all their 'mescheif'" (133). Dunbar's poem similarly depicts adapted confession as the means whereby women forge intimate ties, yet the Tretis goes even further as it concludes with the Wedo's confessional instruction, which initiates the two wives into a community of the "faithful," "not the orthodox community forged by officially sanctioned shrift but the community of 'cummaris'" or gossips (143). Phillips argues that Dunbar structures the wives' speech as confessional gossip, not to realistically portray women's talk, but to experiment with discursive conventions. As Chaucer celebrates gossip's ability to manipulate and remake old stories, so Dunbar employs gossip to open new rhetorical possibilities.
The final chapter, "The Gospel According to Gossips, or How Gossip Got Its Name," considers the depiction of actual gossips, that is, baptismal sponsors, in Wynkyn de Worde's printings of the Fyftene Joyes of Maryage (1507 and 1509) and the Gospelles of Dystaues (based on an earlier 1480-1490 printing). These poems have been neglected by critics, but Phillips demonstrates that they deploy the word "gossip" in ways that anticipate the word's eventual etymological shift and reveal a "particularly English" method for controlling women's knowledge and communities (11 and 201). The translator of the Fyftene Joyes, preoccupied with defining what it means to be a gossip, uses the verb "to gossip" eighty years before it was current in English. Phillips describes the poems as deeply concerned with "the social consequences of women's spiritual kinship both the networks they forge and the pastoral care they provide" (162). The Gospelles of Dystaues, in particular, domesticates female learning and authority through its pictorial scheme, turning Dame Sapience into another frivolous gossip. In an era vigilant against Lollardy, these texts transform productive female speech and pastoral practice into antifeminist caricatures to contain the "not- so-idle talk of these not-so-idle women" (202).
Throughout the book, Phillips refers to dramatic texts that illustrate her points even though medieval drama is not her primary concern. The conclusion reminds readers that in the morality play Mankind, Tutivillus, the representation of idle speech, becomes "both the preacher's nemesis and his alter ego" for the same actor played both parts (204). This image captures Phillips' project in Troubling Talk. Critics have often overlooked gossip as a trifling distraction or marginalized it as transgressive discourse. By attending to its seriousness, Phillips demonstrates that idle talk possesses incredible force and that it constructively shapes lives and stories. This is a thoroughly researched, well-argued, and entertaining book that sheds new light on both canonical and non- canonical texts and demonstrates the diversity of ways that gossip functioned in late medieval England.