John Chamberlin, Medieval Arts Doctrines on Ambiguity and their Place in Langland's Poetics.

(Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 2000). 185 pp. ISBN 0-7735-2073-2. 39.00 [pounds sterling].

Books on Langland's poetics being rarities, the late John Chamberlin's study is very welcome. Recognizing grammar as `the ground of all', Chamberlin argues for the centrality to Piers Plowman of ideas about language developed by writers on the trivium (the title's `arts of discourse'), especially ars grammatica. The first part treats the lexical ambiguity found in `words-as-words'. Symmetrically arranged, chapters i and v provide a `context, ground and overview', iii and vi and ii and vii accounts of respectively Augustine and the twelfth-century writers on ambiguity at the two levels of lexeme and word-form. Chapter iv deals with the Samaritan section in B XVII while its `mirror' chapter viii ranges across the Third, Fifth, and Seventh Visions. This contains a provocative sketch of the poem's structure as `a zigzag within a frame' (p. 140), historically oriented sections at beginning and end (Visions 1, 6-8) framing thematically focused visions that alternate between sin and restitution and the relation between love and knowledge.

The background chapters take deep soundings of the classical traditions preserved by Augustine and bring out the subtlety of twelfth-century thinkers from Hugh of St Victor and Peter the Chanter to the less familiar William de Montibus (noticed by Judson Allen), whose Tropi accompanies Peter's De tropis loquendi in a Worcester MS, F.61, that Langland could have known. But Chamberlin, refreshingly, finds them of more than historical interest: their linguistic realism, with its `triadic' conception of meaning, seriously challenges ...