The Making of Felony Procedure in Middle English Literature.
- Author/Editor
- Wang, Elise.
- Title
- The Making of Felony Procedure in Middle English Literature.
- Published
- Wang, Elise. The Making of Felony Procedure in Middle English Literature. Law and Literature. Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2024.
- Review
- Wang analyses resonances between late-medieval English legal proceedings and Middle English literature, illuminating the law, its records, and--Wang argues--our ways of understanding them and the literature. Wang structures her work in five chapters, each of which "focuses on a different moment in felony procedure, roughly pacing through a case from beginning to end" (17). Consistent methodology reinforces this firm structure throughout, each chapter opening with the description of particular legal documents or methods and their entailed difficulties, followed by assessment of literary texts that illuminate them, and a return to clarification or further questioning of the legal materials and their underlying principles. Chapter 1 is concerned with two coroners' enrollments of death inquest and "St. Erkenwald" as a "death investigation," addressing issues of uses of physical evidence and the role of the community in collecting it. (A version of this chapter was published recently in New Medieval Literatures, 2024.) Chapter 2 addresses the "Placita Corone"--the "only extant manual designed to guide criminal pleading" (19)--and portions of Chaucer's "Man of Law's Tale," "The Seven Sages of Rome," and "Confessio Amantis," Book VII, considering the roles of rhetorical adornment ("frounce" in CA VII.1594) and "narrative satisfaction" (51 and passim) in pleading as well as fiction. Chapter 3 attends to vexing issues of false witnessing and the assumption that "oathworthy" (passim) witnesses need to be of high social status, assessing a 1329 "conspiracy case from Northampton" (78), "The Pistel of Swete Susan," the account of Susannah and the Elders in the Book of Daniel, and its translations, Latin and vernacular. In Chapter 4, Wang treats the four widely separated engagements with Christ's forgiveness of the Good Thief in "Piers Plowman" (a "uniquely legal poem" [98]) in the context of the "documentary technology" (96) that underlies development in legal definitions of "theft" and "robbery." In Chapter 5, she deals with the implications of standing mute before accusation, its consequences (i.e., imprisonment and/or "peine forte et dure"), representations of Christ's silence before his judges in mystery plays, and "Mum and the Sothsegger." In her Epilogue, Wang considers ongoing, pervasive ambiguities of the notion of "felony" in Anglo-American legal history, returning to the "dark imagining" of Felony found in Chaucer's "Knight's Tale" that Wang considered earlier in her Introduction. The book is, thus, admirably well-constructed. Flurries of rhetorical questions (some left unanswered) might raise an eyebrow, while moments of tendentious argument at times prompt disagreement. As an example of the latter, let me cite Wang's discussion of the attempted rape of Chaucer's Custance aboard ship in MLT. Wang's discussion is clear, detailed, assertive, and she justly acknowledges her debt to her ENGL315 class (68n56), but it is a claim too far when she infers that Custance "struggled and 'therefore'" (Wang's emphasis) the rapist fell overboard. "She killed him, we must see." After noting (without corroborative explanation or citations) that "Trevet has Custance [sic] kill the man in unapologetic self-defense" and that "Chaucer could have removed her from all suspicion [of homicide], as Gower did." Wang says that "Chaucer preserves the transparency of his own lie, allowing us to see both his skillful story and the truth behind it" and, as a result, "allows us to experience the pleasing coincidence of factual 'and' narrative satisfaction." Wang's notion that Chaucer uses a "believable lie" (68) in a fictional setting is complex and provocative, especially in light of the mediating presence of the Man of Law as a "professional pleader" (67) invoked earlier by Wang. Yet, she might well have acknowledged the line that closes the stanza she has been considering: "And thus hath Crist unwemmed kept Custance" (2.924), which recalls the previous scene in Chaucer's tale in which the hand of God intervenes overtly to decide the case of Custance's trial. God's judgment was a concern in medieval legal theory and proceedings, as Wang acknowledges recurrently, usually remarking on its waning importance. She chooses, it seems, not to notice it here to maintain the pace of this very pacey, very readable study. [MA. Copyright. John Gower Society. eJGN 44.2]
- Date
- 2024
- Gower Subjects
- Confessio Amantis
Style, Rhetoric, and Versification
Sources, Analogues, and Literary Relations