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STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER empirically: and, as far as I can determine, his premise and practice are both valid. To me itseems to serve as asort ofself-destructingbridge to "the real thing." So I would recommend consideration of this edition, albeit not for college-level courses in Chaucer per se, but as a text to supplement survey anthologies and certainly as a text that secondary school teachers might adopt. WILLIAM A. QUINN University of Arkansas EDWARD PETER NOLAN. Now Through a Glass Darkly: Specular Images of Being andKnowingfrom Virgilto Chaucer. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1990. Pp. xii, 348. $37.50. Metaphors of light and sight have long been the common terms for thought, from the catachretic etymologies of "idea," "theory," "reflection," "enlightenment," "speculation," "wit," and "insight," to Descartes's foun­ dation of rational objectivity on the separation of viewer and viewed, to the modern popular image of the "light bulb" over the head. The intimate dependence of mental process on vision may be said to be fundamental to Western epistemology; this century's Gallic critiques of this tradition have not neglected to demolish that ultimately fictive dependence, witness Bataille's orgasmic "pineal eye," Lacan's mirroring projection of the self, Foucault's panopticon, and French feminism's obsession with the op­ pressive power of the Gaze. In this dependent relationship mirrors hold a special place: they alone allow the viewer to see himself, thus providing the means as well as the metaphor of the Socratic imperative nosce teipsum. The medieval fascina­ tion with mirrors is seen in the countless books whose title begins with the word speculum; the word was used broadly to refer to any production­ linguistic as well as visual-that offered a description or explanation. The wide appeal of the speculum derived ultimately from the Platonic­ Augustinian belief thatlanguage revealed the world,accurately but imper­ fectly, as in a reflection in a mirror- an epistemology whose pervasive importance has been thoroughly charted in Marcia Colish's The Mirror of Language (1983). It is from this broad use of the word that Edward Peter Nolan's book arises. Like the medieval scope of the word, his book ranges 194 REVIEWS far from the expected meanings of the word mirror into a variety of metaphorical extensions: poetic closure, the use of Latin quotation, char­ acter and morality,generic horizons ofexpectation. Finally his book is more a collection of essays linked by various turns of thought on a striking metaphor than a thoroughly developed exposition or argument; it contains a number of deftly precise perceptions on the works considered, but, like the medieval works he studies, the parts are often valuable and coherent in themselves without necessarily resolving into a unified whole. He begins with the idea that for Christian man language is itself a speculum through which we see, darkly, images ofdivine and human Love. This mediated desire provides only imperfect images of its object, but through these images we learn to see ourselves, as in a mirror, as both like and unlike the reflected image. Using Augustine's linking of the Pauline speculum in aenigmate to the human imago dei of Genesis, Nolan stresses the ways in which human beings function as imperfect images of God to one another; human mind, humanexperience,human character can all be mirrors showing divinity through both their nature and their limits. With these felicitous concatenations of ideas on reflexivity and character, Nolan provides a thematic spectrum for his diverse readings of medieval literary texts. Nolan's work can be described in part as a tour ofmedieval moments of literary "mirroring" -moments that both reveal and question the nature of the work, both within and, more problematically, between texts. Virgil's Ivory Gate of False Dream in Aeneid 6 is an example of the former; the combat of Erec and Mabonagrain in Chretien de Troyes's Bree et Emde, which Nolan nicely calls "the defeat of lyric by romance" (p. 139), is an example ofthe latter. Ovid's telling ofthe story ofOrpheus provides both a model for the poetics of the Metamorphoses and a programmatic parody and regeneration of the Virgilian construction of reality; such intertextual juxtaposition, which he...

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