Textual Decorum: A Rhetoric of Attitudes in Medieval Literature.

Blamires, Alcuin

Scott D. Troyan, Garland Studies in Medieval Literature 12 (New York and London: Garland, 1994). vii + 288 pp. ISBN 0-8153-1555-4. $45.00.

Provoked by the allegation that medieval scholarship is perceived as `site of pedantry and antiquarianism', Scott D. Troyan wants to salvage `philology' by merging it with theory both new and old. The old theory is Augustine's assertion in the De doctrina that stylistic strategies are governed by the reactions to be wrought in the reader, not by genre; the new is `holistic', but appears to owe most to pedagogical explorations of reader response.

The task set, therefore, is to construct an approach to medieval literature which acknowledges the Augustinian criterion (recently brandished by British university assessors) of fitness for purpose, and to demonstrate that identifiable processes of audience response are indeed caused by identifiable stylistic features. The application involves a bizarre and seemingly arbitrary spread of texts: specifically, gobbets from two Old English poems, a lyric by Bernart de Ventadorn, parts of the Mystere d'Adam, of a chanson de geste, of an Icelandic saga, and three later English alliterative poems. Troyan conducts case-studies of the affective quality (`attitudinal potential') of particular repeated expressions and episodes, such as deofles craeft and the temptations in Genesis `B'. He also seeks to elicit `attitudinal undercurrents' from syntactical strategies, especially simplicity, complexity, and the pace associated with these. Lastly he proposes that textual `inconsistencies' (of which examples are presented from the Charrete and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) are deliberate devices to reorientate reader response.

Although the book has intellectual sincerity and independence and is very methodical, it drops rather often into humdrum commentary on ways in which successive contexts modify meaning. Some of the humdrum seems to derive from pedagogical sources in the Journal of Reading Behavior. (More refreshing are irrelevant hints from the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, for example on the emotional evidence disclosed by people's gait.) In general Textual Decorum is not a great pleasure to read. It rehearses reader emotions in unattractively wooden prose. An author committed to lexical and syntactical minutiae has been ill served by the production of a text so often corrupt (pp. 51-2, 57-8, 121, 172, 178) and which muddles the translation of a repeated key expression `Co n'iert', in one of two laisses at the very moment when minor variation is what is under scrutiny (pp. 131-2).