Participating in the current critical conversation on modes of gossip and their reciprocal impact upon medieval culture, Phillips's interesting, if tepid, book considers how gossip functioned as a productive cultural force that both sustained and challenged authorities in a range of social, literary, and religious contexts. Identifying the multifaceted role of gossip in connection with the creation, transmission, and reception of texts in late medieval England, this thematic study asserts that "transformation rather than transgression is the principle underlying" gossip as a "discursive phenomenon" (p. 5), and explores the role of "idle talk" in late medieval England beyond its narrowly construed status as "marginalized speech"—that is, beyond its recognizable function as "resistant speech" deployed by non-dominant social groups, women included—in favor of its broader influence in connection with orthodox literary and religious practices.

The book's introduction describes the author's purpose and method primarily in relation to two landmark books on gossip as a social phenomenon: Patricia Meyers Spacks's Gossip (1985), and, more directly, Karma Lochrie's Covert Operations: The Medieval Uses of Secrecy (1999). While eschewing the theoretical grounding, primarily Foucauldian, that leads Lochrie to delve into the communities that generate the texts as well as the text themselves, Phillips likewise takes as her book's main topic how speech functions in literary and ecclesiastical contexts in ways that can be described as transgressive or transformative—Phillips's governing binary, though the distinction between the terms, as well as the significance of their cultural and textual relationships, is inconsistently delineated. She sets out to emphasize the transformative by extending both what constitutes gossip and how it affects orthodoxy. Spacks's treatment of gossip likewise motivates Phillips's own project, in particular Spacks's characterization of gossip as "a mode of resistance, a subversive speech that 'will not be suppressed'" [italics in original] (p. 5). (Footnotes catalogue numerous other applications of gossip theory to literary studies, including, for instance, Patricia Turner, Karen Adkins, Jennifer Coates; here, as elsewhere, secondary materials are typically listed rather than directly engaged.) The introduction describes gossip as "a discursive phenomenon that fundamentally shaped the culture of late medieval England" (p. 12), the book's very broad and largely unhelpful thesis.

The imprecision of the book's stated aims is exacerbated by a series of oddly contentious and vaguely phrased claims of originality, which recur throughout the main chapters and even the conclusion. One could easily forgive a handful of such occurrences as a sign of an author's sincere, if overstated, commitment to a project; but scores of such assertions, in a book of just two hundred pages, are more than tedious. Moreover, readers familiar with the texts that Phillips cites, Lochrie in particular, would be fully aware that the book's thematic and methodological interests have already been widely, and productively, mapped; Phillips's thematic approach is based not on her own innovative treatment of theory (e.g., sociological, linguistic, psychological) but on select components of others' already secondary applications of such approaches to medieval texts. Troubling too is the book's reliance upon broad, and imprecisely defined, terms: in attempting to clarify the medieval subject of "jangling" as it is understood in relation to the modern (nineteenth century) term "gossip," for example, Phillips observes that [End Page 259] a range of verbal transgressions—including garrulous chatter, speech deemed "impudent" or "unproductive," tattling, fibbing, rumor mongering, and fabrication, and the like—were associated with "ydel talk" in the later Middle Ages, and thus with "jangling" (p. 6); but the broadness of these terms, and the mishmash of similar but hardly synonymous verbal tropes, give an odd sense of imprecision to a book that claims as its key focus the particular practical functions of very specific modes of speech.

That said, the four main chapters themselves offer relatively interesting readings of medieval texts in a number of related contexts, even if larded with repetition (phrases, clauses, quotations...