Scott Lightsey aims to investigate late medieval mirabilia and how marvels functioned culturally in fourteenth-century Middle English texts and the court culture that produced them. Chapters devoted to William Langland's Piers Plowman; Geoffrey Chaucer's Squire’s, Franklin’s, and Nun's Priest's tales and his lyric “The Former Age”; John Gower's Confessio amantis; and Mandeville's Travels lead the reader through an array of classical and early medieval treatments of marvelous artifacts and the vexed issue of the value of technology in a postlapsarian world, before focusing on specific images of technical prowess by these four authors. Thus, for example, John Mandeville's descriptions of two mechanical birds and the magic of the clerk of Orleans in Chaucer's “Franklin's Tale” provide opportunities for Lightsey to discuss the reception of these marvels within each text and to suggest that late fourteenth-century marvels referenced the lavish display and material excesses of Richard II's court.
But, unfortunately, the book promises more than it delivers. The argument proceeds in the main by assertion, rather than by proof, and citation errors abound. Because these are so obvious, let me start with them. Of the eleven separate books and articles mentioned in notes 75–85 of chapter 1 (174), taken as a representative example, five of them are not included in Lightsey's bibliography. Of these five, one reference is cited fully in note 78, when the first reference to the book appears in note 68. The others are fully cited in their respective notes, but one wishes for a consistent system. In other cases (e.g., n. 86 on this same page), two authors are mentioned by last name only, and this reader could not find full citations anywhere in the book for them. Page numbers are missing from several citations and even from some quotations given in the text.
The problem with citations extends to primary sources. The author discusses a passage in William Langland's Piers Plowman, but he does not include Piers Plowman in his list of primary sources; it is only fully cited in footnote 61 on page 172. And when one traces less well known primary texts back through the notes, one finds more often than not that the author has relied on another scholarly discussion of the work rather than on the primary work itself. One example must suffice. Of Chaucer's knowledge of court mirabilia, Lightsey writes: “Collections of clockworks, automata, table-fountains and similar devices are listed in French, Flemish, and Burgundian inventories. These marvels began to appear in the literature in various ways, as Christine de Pizan reminded readers of Charles V's awesome collection of fountain automata, and Froissart wrote the Orloge amareuse, playing on the clock as a metaphor for romantic love” (63). The note at the end of this passage should cite several sources, including where these devices are listed in inventories and the exact passages where Christine de Pizan and Jean Froissart reference them. Instead, note 20 lists only a book by William Wixom, Treasures from Medieval France (Cleveland, 1967), 250–51 and plate 18, a book that is fully cited in the note, incidentally, and also in the list of secondary works. But when one checks Wixom's book, an exhibit catalog from the Cleveland Museum of Art, one finds a description of one late fourteenth-century table fountain and this sentence: “We are also reminded that Christine de Pizan stated that Charles V had an imposing collection of table fountains” (250); incidentally, this also without citation.
In the service of full disclosure, my own 1997 book, Chaucer's Gardens and the Language of Convention, is incorrectly cited. Lightsey consistently gives my last name as Hines, suggesting an early transcription error that was never caught. Thus, reader beware: tracking references in this book may take more time than it should.
I begin with citation errors because these problems do not inspire confidence in the author's grasp of scholarly argumentation. This book also gives rise to questions of what sort of data constitutes scholarly proof. Indeed, Lightsey tends to focus narrowly on single passages, reading them broadly as representative of an author's interest in marvels and their importance in fourteenth-century British culture. And while several other primary texts are elicited to support his assertions about Langland, Chaucer, Gower, and Mandeville, his narrow focus on these source texts, making a few lines carry extraordinary weight, creates great expectations that these lines cannot consistently fulfill. With Piers Plowman, Lightsey quotes from the prologue of the B-text a passage that has an angel descend from “on heigh” (line 128), speak in Latin, and crown a kneeling king. Reading this passage in tandem with a precoronation procession of the young Richard II works well, until one realizes that the angel in Piers Plowman is not said to be mechanical and that Lightsey does not discuss this discrepancy at all, assuming its mechanical nature from the start (7). This fact does not diminish the richness of the parallel, but Lightsey's unmarked assumption introduces doubt into the equation. Was Langland really thinking of this event? Are there other ways Langland signaled the parallel or a fascination with mechanical marvels?
This reader also wished for more factual details on the marvels themselves. A promising topic, one that reaches deeply into late medieval culture, marvels deserve a thorough scholarly treatment. Evidence suggests that Lightsey may have rushed this work into production, and we can hope that he will continue to research in this area but with more attention paid to accurate documentation and to building an argument that could convince a skeptic.
