Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages. (Reviews).

Kennedy, William J.

Laurel Amtower. Engaging Words: The Culture of Reading in the Later Middle Ages

(The New Middle Ages.) New York: Palgrave, 2000. xii + 243 pp. $45. ISBN: 0-312-23383-3.

This intelligent and informative book argues for a reflexive relationship between late-medieval reading habits and the shaping of personal identities in the early Renaissance. Amtower examines social and technological shifts in book culture and she shows how they intersect with emergent conceptions of subjectivity and self-awareness. Her crossdisciplinary approach pursues literary history, sociology, and critical analysis, and it focuses on the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries in Italy, France, and England, with particular concentration upon influences leading to and mediated by Chaucer. Surveying the professional roles of readers as lawyers, clergy, diplomats, academics, aristocrats, and an upwardly mobile middle-class commercial populace, Amtower devotes careful attention to a gradual transposition from scholastic modes of textual exegesis to humanist modes of literary commentary. Her chapter on Dante and Petrarch as key figures in this transposition makes an important contribution to cultural histo ry.

The movement of book production from the monastery into the private sphere began in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries with the advent of production houses and their techniques for multiplying scholastic texts in a kind of mass production. Demand for deluxe volumes among the aristocracy in the following century stimulated a further demand for less elaborate volumes among the gentry and commercial middle class. Amtower notes that reading was still "frequently a performed and shared community experience rather than a private one" (37), and she argues that such genres as the Books of Hours allow us to glimpse a realm of private reading devoted to the possibility of self-fashioning through spiritual practices encouraged in the books. Examining Henry VIII's order for the first national English primer in 1545, she focuses upon his denunciation of "the 'pernicious' and 'superstitious' contents of the Books of the Hours that were currently so popular among the laity" (45). Her detailed analysis of these Books illum inates their assumptions about "the special status of reading as an act creating a threshold not only between heaven and earth, but between interior and exterior, spiritual and physical lives" (48). This analysis uncovers various practices of decipherment that encourage "heterodox" associations as well as re-readings that witness "a celebration of both plurality and difference" (65). Such developments contrast with "professional" readings of Scriptural texts by scholastic exegetes who tended toward "universalized" interpretations that de-emphasized "the particularized experience of the reader" (80), and they give witness to emergent habits of reading that would dominate after the introduction of print.

The transitional players in Amtower's narrative are Dante and Petrarch, and a finely textured chapter on the Vita nuova and the Secretum describes their contributions to a history of reading through a close literary analysis of those texts. Dante's convictions about "the ineffectiveness of the [scholastic] commentary tradition" generate a new mode of commentary whereby "the reader must experience the entire Vita on its own terms, experiencing even with the poet the transformative power of love" (94). Petrarch perceives reading as "a metaphor for self-knowledge" (105). In this experience of reading that would inspire succeeding Renaissance humanists to prodigious acts of analysis and interpretation, "one learns to accept new viewpoints and perceptions and to analyze them through appropriate interpretive methods and affects" (110). From this perspective Amtower's later chapters explore "The Ethics of Reading" and "Textual Subjects" as represented in Chaucer's House of Fame, Troilus and Criseyde (particularly in the figure of Cassandra), and Canterbury Tales (particularly in the responses towards texts offered by the Prioress and the Wife of Bath). This book's major interests appear to concentrate on Chaucerian studies and on late medieval English literature in general, but its rich attention to texts in Latin, Italian, and French (with a firm grasp of the philological issues involved in them), and specifically to passages in continental Books of Hours, in Boccaccio and Christine de Pizan as well as in Dante and Petrarch, makes a useful contribution to early Renaissance studies.