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POLITICAL ALLEGORY IN LATE MEDIEVAL ENGLAND. By Ann Astell. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Pp. xii + 218. $35.
Ann Astell's book argues that Langland, Gower, Chaucer, the Gawain-poet, and, to a lesser extent, Malory, are all practitioners of "an allegorical art" (p. 4). These writers, who share a common educational background and the experience of writing in environments of political pressures that require strategic indirection, participate in an "amazing flourishing of political allegory" (p. 2 1) that characterizes later medieval English literature. The works under consideration "refer in remarkably similar ways to similar things" (p. 42), and their allegorical treatment of a common body of issues "signals what is most problematic, worrisome, and threatening in fourteenth-century England" (p. 43). As a solution to their common sources of anxiety and unease, the poets frequently turn to hagiographies, invoking saints as they envision possible or ideal resolutions to socio-political situations of contemporary concern.
Astell begins her detailed intertextual analysis by tracing and stressing the importance of St. Augustine's Ciceronian legacy to vernacular Christian poets. She then systematically examines the rhetorical and poetic theories underlying vernacular allegorical composition, considering the authoritative sources of which the poets, as well as at least some members of their "multi-tiered" audiences, would have made use in their mutual work of allegorical invention. For instance, she analyzes the works of Bruno Latini, Boethius, and Dante as she demonstrates the complexity of the "matter" of poetry, which consists of the literal subject, the intended allegories or parallel texts invoked, and the anticipated audience.
Astell first turns her attention tojohn Ball's letters and Piers Plowman. She claims that Ball's letters are fundamentally allegorical, concealing their meaning to some while communicating it to others. She notes that the letters have a strong association with sermons; in fact, she argues that the letters "are best understood as a kind of shorthand, meant to recall sermons that Ball had previously preached," sermons targeted to address contemporary social and political conditions (p. 48). A substantial section of this chapter is devoted to an analysis of the allegorical "signals" sent by Piers and taken up by Ball; she observes that Ball realized what Langland was notsaying and "supplied what is missing in Langland's text" (p. 66). She closes the...