Discourse and Dominion in the Fourteenth Century: Oral Contexts of Writings in Philosophy, Politics, and Poetry.

That the relationship between orality and literacy in the fourteenth century was complex, varied, and constantly troubled is the initial claim and the eventual burden of this ambitious book, which discusses texts philosophical (Ockham, Wyclif), historical (chroniclers of the reigns of Edward III and Richard II) and literary (Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, "The Knight's Tale") to illustrate and elaborate its large cultural-historical claim. That claim, if I understand it, is that writing in the Middle Ages always claims to be the notation of speech, always asserts its own secondary and subordinate status; but that by this self-imposed subordination, and by thus occluding the "difference of writing," it conspires with social hierarchies that still justify themselves and wield power on the basis of the spoken word. The conspiracy redounds to the advantage of both rulers and writers: to rulers because it suppresses the potentially subversive difference of writing, to writers and the literate because it casts them as the models of social rationality (1920). Literacy is neither an "autonomous" skill bound within its own logic, nor an ideological construct merely embodying extant relations of power (56); it is an initially autonomous skill that, apparently always and apparently inevitably, serves ideological interests but is never entirely assimilated to them. This claim is conceptually explored in the detailed first chapter, and it is promising: it outlines a theoretical approach to the problem of medieval literacy that can notice the relations of power and privilege that literacy always implies without wholly constraining its possibilities.

But all this is advanced as if it were a historical rather than a theoretical argument, and neither the approach to nor the handling of evidentiary detail inspires any confidence. The book is strikingly incurious about what literacy and orality were to - and how such categories were deployed by - medieval writers; he assumes that he knows what literacy and orality are, that they were roughly the same things then, and that theirs is a complex and troubled relationship between obvious and uncomplicated terms. Indeed, Gellrich nowhere notices that, while "literacy" is a category available to the fourteenth century, "orality" is not; nor does he ask why this might be so. Most unfortunate of all, however, are the mistakes in fact and historical judgment that plague the book: it is simply too underinformed and too sloppy to carry conviction. He describes Joachim's Liber figurarum as "a heretical text" (16); he seems to assume that Ockham invented the ecclesiological and canonist chestnut that a two-headed church "body" is a monster (69); he says that Wyclif received the living of Lutterworth in 1381 at the instance of Gaunt and the queen mother (106; he had received it from Edward III in 1374); he speaks of a "Yorkist interest" in the politics of the 1390s (132), almost fifty years before the phrase can be used meaningfully. Throughout, we find odd pieces of unexplored fact. His statement that John XXII's suppression of Franciscan poverty caused Ockham to try "to curb papal infallibility" (62) could not have been written if he had known Tierney's crucial book on the topic. Furthermore, he asserts that Wyclif's argument on grace and dominion "is unexceptional in medieval political theory; in fact, Wyclif had the gist of it from Richard FitzRalph" (98), though Gellrich bizarrely takes FitzRalph as a guarantor of conceptual moderation and respectability, which he could only do without having read the classic work of Katherine Walsh or James Doyne Dawson on FitzRalph (indeed without having read FitzRalph). He seems to imply (32), without evidence, that vernacular literary scribes in Ricardian London copied by pronunciatio - an assertion which, if supported, would materially and crucially change our understanding of the late-medieval book trade - and in the same paragraph cites the evidence that they worked independently in cramped shops, without asking how or to what profit pronunciatio might have been practiced in these circumstances.

These mistakes are merely sampled from what I can only call a smorgasbord of error. It is unfortunate, because the final chapters show Gellrich to be a skilled and often rewarding close reader in an older formalist mode: the splendid discussions of Gawain's "lel lettres loken" (201-02) and of Chaucer's "feeld hath eyen and wode hath eres" (242-44) are good examples of his sustained and vigilant reading of Gawain and the "Knight's Tale." This is not the most fashionable manner in which to write these days; but it would be good to see the author show the courage of his talents and offer good literary criticism instead of bad cultural history.

STEVEN JUSTICE University of California, Berkeley