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A shrewd supervisor of mine once observed that much of the undergraduate degree might be described as 'intellectual tourism' - students are given a whistle-stop tour of the important sights so they know where to return if they wish to take a longer trip in the future. What Douglas Gray's book provides is 'a guidebook for the curious traveller' of the period between Chaucer's death and the dissolution of the monasteries (p. vii). At 650 pages long, this volume may look daunting, but the book is only heavy in the physical sense; once you begin reading it becomes clear that Gray has crafted a book that will be easy for even the complete newcomer to late medieval literature to read. It is deliberately descriptive, and avoids footnotes altogether, favouring instead a useful bibliography at the end of every chapter.

For ease of navigation, Gray has split the book into five sections: I) Introduction, II) Prose, III) Poetry, IV) Scottish Writing, and V) Drama. Because he is not putting forward a specific new theory, but rather a broad picture of literature in the late medieval period, his Introduction does not fill the usual function of laying out the main thesis of the book. The first three chapters, which make up the Introduction, serve a much more foundational purpose within the book as whole: they attempt to sketch the interconnections between the literatures of this period by placing them in their landscape of cultural history. While on the whole this mapping is metaphorical in its scope, the first chapter ('The World: Centres and Edges') quite literally sketches out the lay of the land in the late medieval world, dealing with, amongst other things pilgrimages (The Book of Margery Kempe), perceptions of the Crusades, Turks (focusing on the representation in Thomas More's Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation), exploration (Mandeville's Travels, Utopia), traveling in the English countryside, and urbanization. This chapter also establishes the trend which Gray continues throughout the book - interspersing discussion of the major figures that we would expect to see discussed in such a chapter with less prominent writers and writings, such as the accounts of two fifteenth-century German pilgrims, Breydenbach, and Felix Faber (probably unfamiliar to many English Literature scholars), or the anonymous English account of pilgrimage found in BL MS 2333 (pp. 10-12).

The map plotted by this chapter and the two that follow - 'Bodies, Souls, and Minds' (touching on ailments, remedies, the sacred and profane, affective piety, heresy, intellectual movements, humanism, and education), and 'Media: Image and Word' - means that when we zoom into the local geography of 'Prose' in section II it is much easier to understand how the various genres of writing that this definition encompasses are connected to the broader trends in writing at this time. Of the four groups into which Gray has gathered the literature of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, 'Prose' is possibly the most diverse - a diversity, as he points out, which has been underplayed in R. W. Chambers' thesis of the continuity of English prose (p. 157). Prose covers a sprawling territory, comprising 'practical' prose, prose romance, chivalric guides, tales and jests, moral instruction, religious guides, sermons, and religious treatises (both orthodox and heretical) amongst other things. It is unsurprising, then, that to cover it Gray takes seven chapters (or 150 pages); what is surprising is the cohesive effect of treating together these writings that, on first glance, appear to have little more in common than the fact that they are not written in verse. By seeing Malory's Morte Darthur treated side-by-side, for instance, with The Treatyse of Fysshynge with an Angle, and More's Dialogue Concerning Heresies, the reader can begin to recognise that prose is the mode of writing best suited to impart facts - to edify and to instruct. It is clear to see how this is true for instruction manuals: books such as The crafte of graffynge and planting of trees wish to impart the best techniques of gardening and husbandry; similarly, ars moriendi instruct on the best way to die, and religious manuals, the best way to pray. Prose is also the chosen mode of those who wish to write polemic: verse, with all its formal and linguistic constraints, would present too many obstacles to the clear and persuasive representation of the evidence; and, furthermore, it is most important to be seen to avoid any artifice when it comes to religious controversy. Even with those forms of literature that are explicitly fictional, prose lends its content the air of authority. Gray points out that the trend for prose romance in the later medieval period is coupled with an interest in representing romance as history (p. 179); he speaks specifically of Malory's 'truth-telling voice' (p. 190). Again with tales and jests, humour derives from their formal similarity to writing we might now describe as non-fiction: they are funny and/or instructive because they are a parody of real life, because they represent something that could have happened.

The other three sections serve analogous purposes to that which I have outlined in relation to 'Prose'. The section on poetry shows that this area of writing is almost as diverse as its predecessor, taking in as it does learned, encyclopaedic, and didactic verse, 'Chaucerian' poems, lyrics, and romances. It also contains some more specific studies of works by Hoccleve, Lydgate, Hawes, Barclay, and Skelton. The other two sections, on Scottish writing (concentrating mainly on Henryson, Dunbar and Douglas) and drama (which comprises mostly mystery cycles and morality plays), by contrast, are much narrower areas of study. Nevertheless, by giving attention to less studied Scottish texts such as The Porteous of Noblenes (a translation by Andrew Cadiou, notary and burgess of Aberdeen, of the Brevaire des Nobles), the Deidis of Amorie (found in BL MS Harley 6149), and John Ireland's The Meroure of Wysdome Gray demonstrates that Scottish writing is not as impoverished as it has sometimes appeared from 'the restrictive canons that have blinkered its critics' (p. 441). Similarly, with drama, Gray looks beyond the much-loved cycles to earlier manifestations of the genre, such as the earliest surviving morality play known as The Pride of Life, or later incarnations, like the sixteenth century two-parter, Christ's Resurrection and Burial.

Later Medieval English Literature is a book that could only have been written by someone of Gray's experience and stature. It is not the kind of book that people write at the beginning of their careers to make a name for themselves. The great breadth of learning is truly astonishing, but it is lightly worn: the information is recounted with an ease and elegance of one utterly familiar with his material, and with a generosity of spirit towards the green reader for whom it is primarily intended. But this is not to say that this book is only for an undergraduate audience. The book does a great service to the later middle ages, a period that, as Gray himself points out has in the past been perceived as 'impossibly dull' (p. vii), and therefore it may prove a useful point of access for those earlier medievalists wishing to look forwards to the sixteenth century, or even for early modernists to look back. Furthermore, Gray's frequent forays off the well-worn paths of critical discussion and into the backwaters of more obscure texts means that there is something here for everyone, even the most weathered travellers.

Ruth Ahnert, University of Cambridge