Philip Knox's The Romance of the Rose and the Making of Fourteenth-Century English Literature pairs extensive archival research (seen most explicitly in Knox's detailed appendix documenting late medieval English-speakers’ engagement with the Rose) with rich literary analysis informed by the lens of reception history. Throughout the book, Knox positions authors like Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower as active, readerly participants in a cross-cultural and complex web of responses to the Rose. Thus, Knox's work is situated in ongoing scholarly conversations around medieval England and its relationship with the Continent, as well as in questions of what it means for a text or author to be English or French in a historical context defined by porous linguistic and cultural boundaries. Simultaneously, it tackles questions that reach beyond the Middle Ages—questions of how authors construct their literary identities, and how readers create and reflect the overlapping communities of which they are a part.
Chapter 1 considers the Rose through the lens of courtly reading communities. At the heart of this chapter is the question of how homogenous such interpretive communities might be, given the Rose's multivocality. The chapter is wide-reaching, bringing into conversation such authors as Oton de Granson, Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, Thomas Hoccleve, and the Pearl-poet. Though the chapter covers a lot of ground, Knox guides the reader through its complexity by setting up authorial pairs: Granson and Pizan use the Rose in different ways to create and identify with a seemingly homogenous group of readers; Chaucer and Hoccleve, again with notable differences, problematize such domesticating interpretive communities.
Chapter 2 moves from the courtly to the clerical to argue for the centrality of the Rose in creating a space for vernacular philosophical poetry in fourteenth-century England. Clerical readings of the Rose, Knox argues, recognize the poem as an encyclopedic storehouse of learned Latin sources, but also as a template for how such sources might be transformed through contradiction and self-conscious play. After considering the discourses of nature and desire in the Rose itself, Knox traces these concepts through a wide range of fourteenth-century authors, demonstrating how, to take just two examples, William Langland and the Pearl-poet contend with “dissonance and disorder in the system of nature” through their readings of the Rose (145).
Finally, chapter 3 explores what is, in my view, the book's most compelling theme: the role of the “irreducibly multiple” subjectivity of the Rose in shaping Middle English authors’ notions of poetic identity and poetic fame (174). An exploration of the ways Dante and Jean de Meun were read in relation to one another continues the book's interest in crossing geographic boundaries. And Knox's use of “the pan-European history of the reception of the Rose” in his speculations about the gaps in the Middle English Romaunt of the Rose shows the value of such cross-cultural histories in exploring evidence that might otherwise be ignored due to the fragmentary status of the English text (194). The chapter culminates with a return to Dante to explore how Chaucer responds to both the Commedia and the Rose in his House of Fame, again showing that an English reception history is also necessarily one that spans languages and geographies.
Paradoxically, one of the book's greatest strengths is also one of its greatest challenges. Knox explicitly refrains from organizing chapters around a single author. The Pearl-poet, for instance, emerges as both a courtly and a clerical reader with discussions of this poet's works found in two separate chapters. I agree with Knox that any study of a poem with such a complex, reception history— a poem that is itself multi-authored and intertextual— ought to defy traditional classificatory schemes. But I also found myself occasionally unmoored in chapters that so quickly move from one text and author to the next. For instance, a tantalizing taste of what the manuscript copies of the Rose might mean for our understanding of Chaucer's Retractions jumps quickly into a study of the centrality of the Rose in Gower's self-presentation as a satirist in his Vox Clamantis.
However, to say that I wanted to know more about each of these threads (and others) in the book is a testament to Knox's ability to advance such intriguing arguments and to ask such provocative questions about how we write about literary history and reception in the later Middle Ages.
