Marginalia

This collection of essays contributes to the growing scholarship on sins of the tongue galvanized by Edwin Craun's Lies, Slander and Obscenity in Medieval English Literature (Cambridge, 1997). The editor draws his title from Proverbs both to note how the tongue may be ascribed with agency – for both good and ill – and to comment upon the 'insistent corporality' of writings about speech in the later Middle Ages.

The book is divided into three sections. The first section, 'Sins of the Tongue', largely concerns related pastoral dogma and resistance thereto in post Lateran IV England, the only exception being the first essay by Scott G. Bruce, which explores the 'radicalism' of Cluniac silence and sign language. While a helpful summary of his monograph – indeed many of the essays are redactions – it sits oddly amid essays on (mostly) English pastoralia and canonical authors of the fourteenth century. In a giant chronological, linguistic and contextual leap, Susan E. Phillips then considers the rhetorical strategies of Jacob's Well and Handlyng Synne. Also in this section, Edwin D. Craun places the Wife of Bath's claims to her constellar disposition steadily in the context of writing on defensio peccatorum. Peter R. Schroeder analyzes a final episode in Malory's Le Morte Darthur, positing Lancelot's casuistry explains the problem of his false denial.

It is unclear why the book follows with a second division, 'Punishing Deviant Speech', when these essays easily fit under the first. Elizabeth Ewan examines rituals of slander admissions in late medieval Scotland. Miriam Gill makes a solid and interesting contribution in her survey of late medieval images of blasphemers found in late medieval England and the textual tradition from which this iconography derives.

Essays in the third division, 'Deviant Speech and Gender', examine literary texts and court records concerning idle chatter and defamation in efforts to 'gender' deviant speech. Sandy Bardsley looks at particular kinds of speech and the feminine connotations likely levelled at men who commit them. Where idle chatter and gossip landed accusations of effeminacy in social circles, swearing and defamation were treated as deeds in courtrooms and therefore masculinized. Derek Neal considers 'social and interior' implications of defamation suits on medieval masculinity.

The previous outline serves to show the variety of approaches taken in this volume. While all essayists have some interesting things to say in their particular disciplines and subject areas, the reader wonders whether 'deviant speech' is too broad an umbrella to contain them. 'Deviant speech' makes for an attractive conference session, such as the one from which this collection derives. However, a certain tenuousness persists to relating the ravings of an obscure homilist to the concept of courtly honour.

This quibble, however, results from the conscious interdisciplinary approach that Craun sets out in his introduction. Though there, indeed, existed a 'range of institutions and social groups' that established codes for 'deviant' and 'sanctioned speech', ultimately, it is the lack of established disciplinary standards and methodology that relegates its use by any one reader to a few essays at best.

Phillips' essay 'Janglynge in Cherche: Gossip and the Exemplum' exemplifies some of the troubles inherent of interdisciplinary looseness. The piece considers the 'manipulation' of exempla related to idle talk in the early fourteenth-century verse penitential manual Handlyng Synne and the early fifteenth-century collection of prose sermons Jacob's Well. The author treats Jacob's Well as if it were a court reporter's transcription of the sermons as actually performed, where the actual recitation of sermons contained in manuscripts is at best speculative. To build upon this speculation, in suggesting that repeated and insistent mentions of idle talk in unlikely places demonstrates how the priest has lost control over his audience, seems far-fetched from an historical perspective. If, indeed, the priest is unable to 'silence the congregation', this begs the question: why would he record such embarrassment for posterity, a question unanswered in the essay. In the more likely event that the sermons were read after they were written, this would make these warnings pre-existent to any actual congregation. Mannyng's 'strategy' seems to consist of his localization of exempla, hardly a novel tactic among religious writers or any writers drawing from foreign source material.

Despite the limitations of the interdisciplinary approach, this book may appeal to those seeking a broad view of the critical application of peccata linguae to writing in late medieval England, particularly to the illumination of canonical authors.

Virginia Langum, University of Cambridge.

© 2004 The authors and the Medieval Reading Group at the University of Cambridge
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