Reviews 185

the terrifying events of the rising to oblivion. Justice then turns to the poetry of Chaucer
and Gower, contrasting their literary reactions to the rising as well as their conceptions of
audience and authorial control over the written text. He offers a reading of the Nun's
Priest's Tale as parody of Gower's literary enterprise; this is ingenious and persuasive even
if it pushes the matter a bit far in seeking to link Chaucer's characterization to Gower's
private life (pp. 216-17). The chapter concludes with an analysis of Langland's revisions
in the C text—what Justice styles "a principled evasion"—as a response to the peasantry's
reception of the B version of Piers Plowman and as evidence of the poet's awareness that
his poem had reached not one but many different audiences, and had thereby escaped his
control. Langland admits "what no other poet or chronicler was willing to: that the com-
mons who rose in 1381 defined themselves too as textual communities."
The author is a perceptive literary critic, but more notably brings to this work an un-
common ease with the relevant original documents—chronicle, parish register, court roll,
private letter—and the result is an exciting and provocative inquiry. The book itself, indeed,
provides potent support for Justice's refutation (pp. 5-7) of two anti-empiricist pronounce-
ments that appeared in Speculum 65 (1990): if medievalists, in an effort to "mainstream"
theirfield,renounce the study of language, paleography, etc., the canon will not be enlarged
but only further ossified, since unedited texts will remain so should these laborious arts
cease to be practiced. Justice notes in his introduction that he had not intended to compose
Writing and Rebellion, that it was something of a step on the way to a broader study on
vernacular writing in Ricardian England. Medievalists should be glad for the completion
of this first important book, and look forward to the appearance of the next.
MICHAEL G. HANLY, Washington State University

RICHARD KAY, Dante's Christian Astrology. (Middle Ages Series.) Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Pp. xii, 395; 1figure,tables. $46.95.
Dante's interest in astrology has only slowly been gaining the attention it deserves. In 1940
Rudolf Palgen published his pioneering eighty-page Dantes Sternglaube: Beitrdge zur Er-
kldrung des Paradiso, which concisely surveyed Dante's treatment of the planets and of the
sphere of fixed stars; he demonstrated that it is governed by the astrological concept of the
"children of the planets" (in each sphere the pilgrim meets souls whose lives reflected the
dominant influence of that planet) and that in countless details the imagery of the Paradiso
is derived from the astrological tradition. In Palgen's wake, Georg Rabuse devoted his entire
career to the subject. Der kosmische Aufbau der Jenseitsreiche Dantes: Ein Schlussel zur
Gottlichen Komodie (Graz, 1958) argued that the entire Commedia is arranged according
to the sequence of the elements and the planets; it explored in detail the realms of Mars in
the three cantiche. Fifteen of his articles were collected in his Gesammelte Aufsdtze zu
Dante, edited by Erika Kanduth, Fritz Peter Kirsch, and Siegfried Loewe (Vienna, 1976).
Though many of Rabuse's specific conclusions were mistaken, his oeuvre remains the most
serious effort to date to come to terms with this thorny, but centrally important, material
in the poem as a whole.
Richard Kay's volume is a valuable contribution to this nascent field, though its claim
to be "as far as I know . . . the first systematic attempt to identify astrological allusions in
the Commedia" (p. xi) is misleading. In fact Palgen and Rabuse arguably qualify, but they
are mentioned only in passing (Palgen only in note 22 on page 288, where Kay's list of
Palgen's sources omits, among others, Guido Bonatti and Abraham Ibn Ezra, both of whom
Palgen cites frequently); there is no attempt to confront and measure these scholars' con-
tributions, no mention of Rabuse's lengthy discussion of the heaven of Mars, no acknowl-
edgment of Palgen's priority in the general question under investigation.
186 Reviews
Kay's volume deals with material traced by Palgen: the lore of the seven planets in the
Paradiso (Kay excludes the fixed stars), and it follows a similar method. However, it draws
on a fuller shelf of astrological treatises than Palgen had cited (more on this point later),
as well as a wealth of recent scholarship, and it considers the question in much greater
detail (several of Kay's chapters are almost as long as Palgen's entire monograph). A ju-
dicious introduction sets forth the universality of belief in astrology in the Middle Ages,
distinguishes between its deterministic and nondeterministic forms, and explains the
method to be followed; then Kay devotes a chapter to each of the seven planets. Like Palgen,
he argues (again, in more detail) that Dante adapted traditional astrological views to his
own Christian ones; he finds this process intensified in the upper heavens. A seventeen-
page conclusion tabulates the results and suggests further avenues of investigation, and
there is a very useful biobibliography on the astrological texts and their authors as well as
a full index.
Kay's method is to search in the astrological literature, in the sections devoted to the
"properties" of the planets, for statements that can be correlated with elements of Dante's
text, and to present the correlations by juxtaposing passages. The results are surprisingly
rich; even if one accepted only half, say, or a quarter of the more than fourteen hundred
allusions to astrological lore that Kay claims to have found in the first twenty-two cantos
of the Paradiso, the score would be impressive. There is a wealth of information here that
future interpretations of the Commedia will need to take into account.
Kay engagingly acknowledges in his conclusion that he has made little attempt to answer
the question "What does it all mean?" This is a conscious choice on his part; he argues
that the importance of the subject needs to be established before scholars will devote their
energies to its study. On countless pages, however, the need for a governing conception of
how the astrology is integrated into the poetry is palpable, and I foresee that this will feed
the skepticism of many readers. Kay's method has the disadvantage that in his treatment
of both the astrological literature and the Paradiso he is led to a kind of atomistic and
literal approach in which details are taken out of context. At times he allows the astrological
items to determine his understanding of Dante's text and is led into statements contrary to
Dante's, as when (p. 28) he concludes, on the basis of the astrological writers, that Piccarda
and Costanza, lunar personalities, "would be equally attracted" to monastic life and "a
more mundane form of domesticity." Dante's Piccarda (3.103-17) is explicit in stating the
opposite. Nevertheless, the disadvantages of Kay's method and his occasional excesses
cannot undermine the importance of much of the evidence he presents.
Kay's choice of his nine basic astrological texts (he refers in passing to many others)
draws on Albertus Magnus's list in his Speculum astronomiae, adding Abraham Ibn Ezra,
Guido Bonatti, and Michael Scot. No one would quarrel, I think, with his inclusion of any
of the texts in his list, as long as they are treated as examples of the tradition rather than
asserted as direct sources; it is consensus rather than uniqueness among the astrologers
that will carry persuasive force here. The importance for Dante attributed by Kay to Bonatti
and Scot is likely to turn out, as his results are winnowed, to be exaggerated.
Some of Kay's omissions are puzzling. There is no mention of the well-known mistake
by which Dante places Venus in Pisces in 1300 (Purg. 1.21); Kay shows it in Taurus—its
actual position—without comment. There is no discussion of the important question of
Dante's debt to Macrobius. Though Rabuse exaggerated that debt, the case he so pains-
takingly set forth, in a whole series of writings (including the Macrobius article in the
Enciclopedia dantesca), needs to be carefully considered and reduced to its proper dimen-
sions. Even the skeptical Alessandro Ronconi, though unfriendly to Rabuse's approach,
adduced further evidence in favor of Dante's knowledge of the Somnium (ED, s.v. Cice-
rone). In this light Kay's laconic dismissal of Macrobius as an influence on Dante, without
any discussion (p. 362, n. 145), is astonishing. But in general Kay shuns the question of
 Reviews 187
how Dante's astrology fits into his larger cosmology. One may sympathize with his reluc-
tance to involve himself in a task whose scope is indeed daunting, though it is one of the
most important now confronting Dante studies. In any case Kay has focused attention on
one major aspect of it, and he has given us much to be grateful for.
ROBERT M. DURLING, University of California, Santa Cruz

HUGH KENNEDY, Crusader Castles. Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Pp. xvi, 221 plus 7 color plates; 81 black-and-white plates, 25 figures, 1 map. $39.95.
Because the study of crusader castles, indeed the entire analytical framework in which they
are considered, has changed dramatically over the past few decades, this book is different
from previous works with the same or a similar title (e.g., R. Fedden and J. Thomson,
Crusader Castles [London, 1957], and W. Miiller-Wiener, Castles of the Crusades [London,
1966]). Gone is the simplistic cataloging of architectural similarities and dissimilarities to
Byzantine and Muslim fortifications for the purpose of deciding whether crusader architects
were simply copyists. Gone is the overemphasis on major castles like Sayun and the Crac
des Chevaliers, in favor of a more expansive view that includes, for example, towers of the
lay nobility. The work of Denys Pringle and of others who have conducted regional surveys
and new excavations receives important attention. Gone also is the overemphasis on ar-
chitectural development devoid of serious historical context. For Kennedy, advances in siege
artillery at the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth century provide the proper
historical context, since architectural development "must be seen as the result of a contin-
uing dialectic between attack and defence which gave the advantage sometimes to one,
sometimes to the other" (p. 98). Thus there is an entire chapter (chap. 5) devoted to new
developments in siege artillery, something quite new in books of this type. Not only in the
synthesis of recent archaeological work and architectural study, but also in the attempt to
place crusader castles within this kind of historical context (so well described by Latin
writers like William of Tyre and by Muslim writers) is the book a suitable barometer, so
to speak, of the direction of recent crusader castle scholarship.
The old question of who the crusaders borrowed their military architecture from assumed
an inferior knowledge of sophisticated fortifications and, perhaps, a more general cultural
inferiority to the East that necessitated rank copying. Today these assumptions are no
longer tenable. Rather, the author reflects a growing consensus view among historians of
the Crusades that the crusaders "had experience of a large number of different castle types
in their homelands. Furthermore, they were used to adapting designs to local terrains. They
needed no eastern masters to show them how to build a certain [curtain] wall along the
crest of the ridge or to separate an inner redoubt by walls and ditches from an outer bailey"
(p. 14). The crusaders were pragmatic and inventive, and their pragmatism and invention
were in response to the specific dangers they faced. Thus Kennedy rightly believes that "we
shall probably understand more about the architecture of Crusader castles by investigating
the needs and purposes of the builders and the threats they faced than by searching for
outside influences" (p. 20). On the other hand, he recognizes that they were influenced by
what they saw and conquered. Enough is known of Byzantine and Armenian fortifications
to say that the crusaders may have found the round towers on Armenian castles worth
borrowing but that Byzantine influence is much less demonstrable. This was shown con-
vincingly by R. C. Smail some forty years ago in Crusading Warfare (1097-1193) (Cam-
bridge, Eng., 1956, pp. 236-39), in the case of Sayun, an important Byzantine castle that
the crusaders refortified.
One can disagree with the author on the role of the crusader "castrum" castle in the
development of "concentric" castles. These rather small, rectangular Frankish forts, with