Book Review - Acts of Recognition: Essays on Medieval Culture by Lee Patterson

Lee Patterson’s Acts of Recognition is a collection of ten essays, nine of which have appeared previously in journals and harder-to-access miscellanies published between 1981 and 2001. ‘Lightly revised throughout’ (p. ix), the essays reflect Patterson’s diverse scholarly concerns and eclectic literary critical interests. Discussions range across historical debates between Exegeticism and New Criticism, pedagogy, and more traditional modes of literary and historical criticism, while subjects under consideration extend from Virgil and Boethius, to Beowulf, the works of Chaucer and his near-contemporaries, and beyond to Milton and A. E. W. Mason’s The Four Feathers (1902).