Pinti, 'Job, Boethius and Epic Truth', Bryn Mawr Medieval Review 9505
URL = http://hegel.lib.ncsu.edu/stacks/serials/bmmr/bmmr-9505-pinti-job
@@@@95.5.16, Astell, Job, Boethius and Epic Truth
Astell, Ann. Job, Boethius and Epic Truth. Ithaca, NY: Cornell
University Press, 1994. Pp. xv, 240. $32.95. ISBN 0801429110
Reviewed by Daniel J. Pinti, New Mexico State University
In this admirably ambitious study Ann Astell addresses the complicated
issues involved in the study of medieval secondary epic, and offers a
far-reaching, stimulating, and largely successful analysis of "the
Boethian and Joban mediation of the classical epic tradition in the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance" (21). What this mediation entails, of course,
is 1) the reader's abandoning of purely formal concerns when defining the
epic genre and 2) the recognition of the allegorical "truth" about human
moral and spiritual existence to be found hidden under the form of
conventional epics and revealed in many works that fall outside of our
conventional "Homer-Virgil-(Dante)-Milton" genealogy of epic. Along with
rooting her study in medieval exegetical commentary traditions (notably
Gregory the Great and Aquinas), Astell builds forthrightly and smartly on
certain key scholarly works that have addressed specific texts in her
study in somewhat more focussed fashion: Lawrence L. Besserman's The
Legend of Job in the Middle Ages, Seth Lerer's Boethius and
Dialogue: Literary Method in the Consolation of Philosophy, and
Barbara K. Lewalski's Milton's Brief Epic: The Genre, Meaning, and Art
of "Paradise Regained", among others. What Astell adds to this
scholarship is the synthesis of a complex body of material in an
impressively lucid way, and readings of texts that extend beyond the
expected range of the subject in question. While Astell's readings of
medieval commentary and literary texts are occasionally too concise to be
fully convincing, she has nevertheless authored a book that should prove
interesting and valuable to literary scholars in both medieval and
Renaissance studies.
The book falls rather neatly into two parts. The first part
includes an introduction, which presents an overview of the medieval
reading (through Gregory the Great, Isidore of Seville, Bede, and Rabanus
Maurus) of the Book of Job as a "biblical counterpart to the epics of
antiquity," along with an argument for Boethius's Consolation
"stand[ing] as a major conduit for the continuation of the classical epic
tradition in the Middle Ages" (11). Chapter 1, "Allegories of
Logos and Eros, goes on to argue how Boethius'
Consolation and Martianus Capella's De nuptiis Philologiae et
Mercurii join two lines of allegorical reading in antiquity: one
emphasizing logos, "the intellectual [and universal] discovery of
the causes of things," the other emphasizing eros, "the moral [and
personal] application of truth" (21; cf. 29). "Boethius and Epic Truth,"
the second chapter, argues for the epic truth written into the
Consolation as a heroic growth and journeying toward
self-knowledge, while Chapter 3, "Job and Heroic Virtue," delineates how
medieval exegetes read Job not only as typologically linked to Christ but
also as heroic in his steadfastness, his embodiment of sapientia
and fortitudo.
Chapter 4 begins the second part of the book, the reading of
medieval and Renaissance texts in light of this tradition of epic truth
mediated through Job and Boethius. "Hagiographic Romance" discusses the
Old English version of the Passio Sancti Eustacii Martyris along
with Chaucer's Clerk's Tale and Man of Law's Tale as
"legenda . . . [which] mediate in turn between the books of Job and
Boethius, using Boethius' Consolation intertextually to qualify the
world of (mis)fortune and human pain; Job to typify the realm of moral
constancy, providential design, and happy endings" (97-8). Astell is
especially astute in her analysis of the Man of Law's Tale and its
satiric interplay of prayer (the discursive mode associated with
Constance) and apostrophe (the mode associated with the tale's narrator),
what the author characterizes as "the pathetic outcry of Job merge[d] with
the apostrophic weeping of the Boethian prisoner" (126). Chapter 5 then
outlines the rewriting of the Consolation "as a salvific love story
in which the suffering hero advances from and through a passionate love of
creatures to the love of the Creator" (127) by examining Abelard, Dante,
and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde.
Chapter 6, "Ghostly Chivalry," moves back to a predominantly Joban
paradigm, first recapitulating the history of medieval chivalry in terms
of the changing readings of the spiritual warfare of Job as "(1) opponent
of Satan, (2) crusader against malefactors, (3) penitent self-conqueror,
and (4) victor over despair" (159), and then offering readings of works as
wide-ranging as Aelfric's version of Sulpicius Severus' Vita Sancti
Martini to Book 1 of Spenser's Faerie Queene. The final
chapter, "The Miltonic Trilogy," argues that each of "Milton's major
poems"--Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes, and Paradise
Lost--reads and imitates Job in a radically different way" (188) and
that each, moreover, recalls Boethius' Consolatio in its own unique
way. The chapter culminates in an examination of the influence of the
medieval consolatio tradition on the final two books of Paradise
Lost. A brief conclusion summarizes the book's argument and also
reveals explicitly just how thoroughgoing is the dialogue between Astell's
book and such classics of medieval romance criticism as W. P. Ker's
Epic and Romance.
Astell's book is not without its quirks and intriguing
lacunae. Because of the book's tremendous scope, the sheer breadth
and variety of the literary works it takes up, at times certain readings
will have an almost reductio ad absurdum feel to them. The mere
four pages of Chapter 4 chronicling "Dante's Boethian Beatrice," for
instance, discuss not only Dante's Vita Nuova but also
Inferno 5, Purgatorio 2, and Purgatorio 30-33;
moreover, they do so largely through plot summary and include at least one
outright misreading of the text in question: the claim that Francesca
"names Boethius Dante's teacher" in Inferno V.121-23. The notably
longer analysis of Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde in the same
chapter is marked by greater perspicacity but also by a tendency to ignore
criticism on the Troilus appearing since 1980 or so (Wetherbee's
Chaucer and the Poets is an exception, along with a few others, to
this rule). And although they perhaps lie outside the stated scope of
Job, Boethius, and Epic Truth, certain works from the Middle Ages
and the Renaissance might well have merited at least some mention in
Astell's study if only for purposes of contrast. The absence, for
example, of any discussion of Boccaccio's Teseida bespeaks Astell's
overestimation of what she sees as medieval writers' almost complete
disinterest in the formal characteristics of classical epic. (Astell's
claim that "as a literary kind, recognizable by distinctive formal
features, 'epic' was unknown in the Middle Ages" [17] seems to go too
far.)
But this is all to ask even more of a book that already does a great deal,
and does it very well. Job, Boethius, and Epic Truth is an
engaging summary of an immense body of material, valuable both as an
overview of the Joban-Boethian tradition and a source for some perceptive
and thought-provoking readings of individual texts, and useful in its
insights on the question of the relation between medieval epic and romance
and the common threads of "epic truth" woven through medieval "heroic
poetry." With its thorough historicizing of this branch of medieval
literary history, Job, Boethius, and Epic Truth should find a
respected place in the scholarly corpus surrounding two complex
matters that even today are often hindered by simplistic old saws: the
medieval reception of the literary traditions of antiquity, and the
Renaissance reception of the literary traditions of the Middle Ages.