Abstract

346 RHETORICA Kennedy's standards. Still, Schiappa's book will help us continue this important conversation about rhetorical history, epistemology, and disciplinarity—a conversation that his work has been instrumental in fostering. Janet M. Atwill The University ofTennessee Anne W. Astell, Political Allegory in Late Medieval England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), xii + 218 pp. New historicism has encouraged a generation of scholars to abandon the older critical tradition which believed that literary merit gave texts a value to which historical context was irrelevant. Believing that context illuminates aspects of writers' choices and presentations of their subjects, Anne W.Astell seeks to show that some of the best known vernacular writers, principally in Richard IPs reign—Chaucer and Gower, the anonymous author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight—composed specific commentaries on contemporary events which an informed audience would recognise as critical analysis of political behaviour. Perhaps the best way to appreciate her purpose is to start with her conclusions where she summarised what she has attempted to argue. Earlier attempts to read vernacular medieval texts as verbally encoded in accordance with known contemporary rules of encryption, such as acrostics, were rejected by literary critics. Astell seeks to make a flexible interpretation of code words and allusions more acceptable by providing a framework of classical rhetorical rules from Cicero, Augustine and Boethius that were sufficiently well known and clearly used to serve as the scaffolding of their allegorical explanations. Some of the allusions on which she depends are individually weak, for the likeness of the king to the sun and the intercessory role of a queen consort were commonplaces—relevant not only to Richard and Anne's behaviour but to the expected behaviour of kings and queens throughout Europe—appropriated by the writers Reviews 347 only in the sense that they represented received ideas. She strengthens her case by the use of additional references. The counsel offered is traditional but as relevant to Richard as it would be to other monarchs in a society where men who were to him overmighty subjects saw him as little more than Primus inter pares. The extent to which the usual topoi of poems providing a "mirror for princes" is focused on the particular problems of Richard's reign would be assisted by a brief indication of the basic ideological divisions between the disputants and the precision with which the writers reflect these, which seems to vary from writer to writer. The evidence that Gower was already writing from a Lancastrian standpoint in the Confessio Amantis is comparatively straightforward. Ignoring the case for Richard's right to use his prerogative and presenting his supporters as scoundrels and treasonous by drawing a dubious comparison with a classical parallel is a familiar device used by skilled lawyers presenting a partisan case. Astell's interpretation of Chaucer's Monk's and Nun's Priest's tales starts with an argument that Richard sought consciously to emulate Edward the Confessor, and Edward II, whom he sought to have canonised as a martyr, one or both of whom were referred to "in passing" before the Monk goes on to a cautionary tale of the fall of princes, some of whom died as result of their tyranny and some because of their enemies' ambitions. The Confessor's position vis a vis the coronation ceremonies, however, is hardly peculiar to Richard's coronation and its precise relevance to the Pales is not made clear. The tale of Chauntecleer the cock, a fable included in most fabular compilations, can serve various didactic ends. It is here presented as a comedy of Richard's early years in which a man susceptible to flattery and bad advice (Richard) is able to learn from mistakes. The establishment of it as an identifiable account of the peasants' revolt is a difficult trail through other literary uses of animal embodiment. Such comparatively simple allegorical instructions are easier to accept than the complex allegory by which the beheading of the Green Knight is presented as a symbol of the execution of the earl of Arundel and the whole tale as an invitation to Richard to express penitence. To start with, it requires a date after 1397, while...