Writing War: Medieval Literary Responses to Warfare

Modern Language Review, The, July, 2005 by Andrew Breeze

Two minuscule criticisms. The name of Najera, a battlefield sixty miles from where this reviewer writes, is printed inaccurately (p. 160). Nor (though it cites his other publications) does A Companion to Gower mention Bernardo Santano Moreno's monograph Estudio sobre 'Confessio amantis' de John Gower y su version castellana 'Confisyon del amante' de Juan de Cuenca (Caceres: Ediciones de la Universidad de Extremadura, 1990).

Now for praise. A Companion to Gower sets out to be the book on Gower and handsomely achieves that end. The editor deserves full thanks for having brought together her authors (many of them senior figures in medieval studies) and eliciting their contributions. This is a book that will be used for years to come. It will be consulted with profit by researchers on matters as diverse as the politics, book production, literary life, and languages of fourteenth-century England. It helps put into three dimensions the life, work, and times of a medieval man of letters.

Books by many writers sometimes give the sensation of a crowd. As the work of one author, Claire McIlroy's The English Prose Treatises of Richard Rolle is thus a quieter study than those above. Yet it is a solid, informative, and satisfying achievement. It has five chapters. In the first the author considers Rolle as an English writer, who wrote much in Latin but turned to English for necessary spiritual purposes. She observes that over five hundred medieval manuscripts of Rolle's works survive (more than fifty of them of his English writings). He was thus an author more widely disseminated than Chaucer. Since many of his readers were women (whose names we know), he allows discussion of readership and gender, particularly as we also know much of his life. In the second chapter McIlroy introduces us to medieval devotional affectivity and its implications for readers (especially female ones), tracing its origins in such sources as the Song of Songs, Plotinus, pseudo-Dionysius, and St Bonaventure. Affective devotion might nowadays seem a syrupy kind of spirituality. One notes that aspects of it received criticism even in the fourteenth century, as in (pp. 28-29) The Cloud of Unknowing. When Rolle applies erotic language (p. 37) to the relation of God and the soul ('Forthi that I love thee, I woo thee, that I might have thee as I would, not to me, but to my Lord. I will become a messenger to bring thee to his bed'), danger may be sensed. Similar feelings might apply to the more lachrymose aspects of Rolle's teaching ('the gift of tears').

The last three chapters analyse separately the vernacular treatises Ego dormio, The Commandment, and The Form of Living, noting (p. 100) their contrasts (Rolle can on occasion appear dry, didactic, and conformist), and diligently analysing their themes and images. These are varied. They include spiritual love compared to the marriage bed, love of the Blessed Virgin, the heart and eye as spiritual metaphors, devotion to the Holy Name, the spiritually blind (compared to bats), chaste spiritual friendship between men and women, and distrust of book-learning. Besides Rolle's multiplicity of reference, we also hear much of his disciples (many female) and patrons in north and west Yorkshire.