New Perspectives on Middle English Texts: A Festschrift for R. A. Waldron. Edited by Susan Powell and Jeremy J. Smith, with a personal memoir by Derek Pearsall. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2000. Pp. xi + 190. $75.

The essays in this Festschrift are organized into two parts, corresponding to the two major areas of the dedicatee's scholarly activities: alliterative poetry and close textual analysis. They range over classics of Middle English, but also include less well-known texts. Waldron is the co-editor of one of the best editions of the works of the Gawain-poet, so it is appropriate that several of the essays are about Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Malcolm Andrew discusses the sophisticated handling of setting in all four poems, arguing that in the hands of this master craftsman they become "remarkably subtle and resonant contexts" (p. 4). Susan Powell worries at the "knotty problem" of the pentangle and the girdle. She explores number theory and heraldry, and concludes that knots, both literal and symbolic, are crucial to unknotting the meaning of the poem. Jeremy Smith considers sound-symbolism in four lines from the first temptation scene in Sir Gawain which contain sl-lexemes; he shows that this sound had associations for the poet's contemporaries with evil, carelessness, and sloth, so "the alliteration therefore relates directly to the meaning. The overall effect is to make the state of sleep a metaphor of moral abdication" (p. 98).

Elizabeth Archibald
University of Bristol