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Shapeshifters in Medieval North Atlantic literature ed. by Santiago Barreiro and Luciana Cordo Russo (review)

natural world or interpretations framed by recent literary theory, receive little attention. Other topics, such as Langland’s representations of secular clergy, receive careful treatment here that builds on, and sometimes corrects, Lawler’s previous publications. A mini-essay on the significance of the preposition “til” for Langland (p. 327) exemplifies the innumerable, novel insights also gathered here. Lawler’s final four pages give a masterful analysis of the commentary by Langland’s Good Samaritan on a traditional proverb about three things that will drive a man from his house: a wicked wife, rain, and smoke. This has always seemed to me an odd, anticlimactic end to an important, moving section of the poem, but Lawler argues illuminatingly that it occasions “the most compassionate version of the pardon formula in the whole poem, and its most eloquent expression of Langland’s deep conviction both that we need each other and that we have God’s mercy” (p. 432). And thus it also occasions an apt concluding word from one of this poem’s most faithful and insightful readers. Curtis Gruenler Hope College