Sanctifying Signs: Making Christian Tradition in Late Medieval England. by David Aers. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2004. Pp. xiv + 282. $55 (cloth); $25 (paper).

David Aers is deservedly one of the most widely read literary medievalists of his generation, with six books written over three decades to his credit, each of them packed with learned, thoughtful, and ethically impassioned analysis of a range of late fourteenth- and early fifteenth-century texts. After working for some years within a broadly Marxist paradigm—his writing remains far more indebted, theoretically and rhetorically, to Cultural Materialism than to New Historicism—Aers's publications since the early 1990s have taken an increasingly noticeable turn towards theology: a turn he admits is unfashionable but defends as vital to any serious engagement with medieval religious texts (p. ix). Here, English and Latin texts by William Langland, Nicholas Love, John Wyclif, Walter brut, William thorpe, and others are thus read, not through modern literary and political theorists, but through the Gospels, Aquinas's Summa theologica, and several contemporary theologians, especially Rowan Williams. Aers seeks to explore how theological controversies around several important late-medieval signs (the Eucharist; the sign of poverty; the house) were conducted in a range of academic and vernacular texts and how all participants in these controversies viewed the relation between theological theory and sociopolitical practice.

Nicholas Watson
Harvard University