The two parts of C. David Benson's Imagined Romes: The Ancient City and Its Stories in Middle English Poetry are united by their common focus on ancient Rome, but in other respects they are quite separate. In part one, Benson examines two anonymous and little-known fourteenth-century works in verse, the Stacions of Rome and an interpolation on Rome in the Metrical Version of Mandeville's Travels. In part two he deals with the treatment of Roman themes by Gower, Chaucer, Langland, and Lydgate.

Besnon does a good job with the two anonymous texts. The Stacions is mainly an inventory of churches and the saints or relics they enshrine, in each case stating the exact amount of pardon they offer. (Indulgences and the pardons they provide are the poem's main concern, though one must go to the endnotes for much necessary information about them.) But Benson shows well how the poet, who speaks largely in the second person, involves his readers both by gentle appeals to their piety and by vividly recalling people or events associated with a particular church or relic. There is no interest in pre-Christian or contemporary Rome, and the popes and martyrs named are nearly all from the early Christian centuries. Though the poet makes some attempt to suggest an actual pilgrimage route through the city, the Stacions is not a travel guide, and Benson suggests persuasively that one of its functions was to enable readers to imagine a pilgrimage to Rome rather than undertake one.

Half the chapter on the Mandeville interpolation is devoted to the tradition of the twelfth-century Mirabilia urbis Romae. Following the Mirabilia, the Mandeville passage celebrates the marvels of the pagan city, but where the Mirabilia traces a continuity between the pagan city and its Christian successor, the interpolation shows them in conflict. The author omits most of the Mirabilia's portrayals of virtuous Romans and is disturbed by what he sees as pagan idolatry and the influence of supernatural powers. He reports with satisfaction the destruction of temples and monuments whose very splendor is a potentially dangerous distraction for Christian pilgrims, and he ends by praising Christian Rome, with its many churches and its promise of generous pardons.

The Ricardian poets discussed in part two deal with Roman people and their political and religious lives rather than the city's physical layout, and by drawing together the Roman stories of each poet, Benson manages to construct an effective argument about each. Addressing the many tales with Roman settings in Gower's Confessio Amantis, Benson traces the concern with good governance and social order present even in tales primarly concerned with love or warfare. Several tales show ordinary citizens calling on Caesar and other leaders for justice or largess, and even criticizing them. The political virtues discussed in Book 7 are exemplified by upright judges and generous or merciful rulers, nearly all from pre-Christian Roman history. The danger of placing too much emphasis on a single virtue appears in the tales of Lucretia and Virginia, whose deaths result from an overvaluing of chastity. Constantine, a wise and benevolent ruler before his conversion, as a Christian commits the fatal error of overpiously granting absolute temporal power to the church.

Chaucer's Rome, says Benson, is “a place of unrelenting oppression” (79), where women whose only resource is a moral fortitude that recalls that of Gower's virtuous statesmen are at the mercy of men who abuse their political authority in order to victimize them. The suicides of Dido and Lucretia in the Legend of Good Women and the murders of Virginia and Cecilia in the Canterbury Tales result diretly or indirectly from the cruelty or moral confusion of men. The oppressors derive no happiness from their actions; the virtue of Lucretia and Virginia benefits noone.

Benson's chapter on Langland centers on the bond between Pope Gregory the Great and the pagan Roman emperor Trajan. Trajan's release from hell and the granting of salvation were by his own account a reward for his virtuous character, endorsed by Gregory's loving compassion. Langland has none of the trust in indulgences that appears in the Stacions. It is the unique combination of Gregory's love and Trajan's “lyvyng in truthe” that effect the emperor's salvation and, and Benson shows how their relationship, in its beauty, symbolizes “the dialectic between justice and mercy” central to Langland”s poem (117).

The book's final chapter, on Lydgate's Fall of Princes, does brief justice to the positive qualities of famous Romans, but sees them as finally doomed by a condition of “division” that, present at the founding in the opposition of Romulus and Remus, pervades Roman history, and ensures that princes and subjects alike will come to a tragic end. The downfall of Coriolanus and the Scipios is due to division caused by the Rome's reluctance to appreciate and reward their commitment to the city's “comoun profit,” and division between Caesar and Pompey led to civil war. The exception to this otherwise unvaryingly unhappy history is the emperor Constantine, treated by Lydgate as an ideal Roman leader. After his conversion and his granting of secular power to the pope he retains his imperial role and becomes the champion of Christianity.

The book ends with a thorough and complex treatment of Lydgate's two tellings of the story of Lucretia. The first, based on a Declamatio by Collucio Salutati, takes the form of a dialogue between Lucretia and her husband after her rape by Tarquin, in which she argues that rape may cause its victim to feel a certain reluctant pleasure, which she suspects in herself. That an agonizing sense of guilt for this pleasure, however slight, may have led to Lucretia's suicide is explored subtly by Lydgate and treated with sensitivity by Benson. In the second version, Lucretia is a submissive wife who in a long speech asks her husband to judge whether she is impure. While all are vehemently declaring that she is innocent and must be avenged, she takes a sharp knife and, unnoticed, stabs herself in the heart. As Benson observes, we are here given “a poignant sense of the final unknowability of even the most vivid fictional characters,” and “the shock that comes from directly confronting the terror and pity of the human condition” (143). This fine reading provides a fitting conclusion to a good book.