The Book of the Incipit: Beginnings in the Fourteenth Century. By D. Vance Smith. Medieval Cultures, 28. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Pp. xiii + 295. $34.95.

In his "Preliminary" to The Book of the Incipit, D. Vance Smith declares that "the question of whether a poem obeys or disregards conventions of literary form is not intrinsically interesting to us anymore, at least since we have begun to think more about the cultural, political, and social pressures on writing in the Middle Ages and since we have begun to think of formalism as a mode of understanding literature that is dangerously synchronous"(p. x). For one who has just adverted to his own beginnings in an unnamed "former British colony," the imperial force of his pronouns "us" and "we" can scarcely be inadvertent. But since "cultural, political, and social pressures" frequently become enshrined in "conventions," some "formalism" might have healthily restrained his own "dangerously synchronous" use of the first person plural.

M’ce‡l F. Vaughan
University of Washington, Seattle