The Middle Ages is distinctive for its preponderance of unwritten — in some ways not only unattributed but genuinely unauthored — literature: the songs, lyrics, stories, dramas, and riddles that circulate in all cultures but much less prestigiously so in the age of print, authors, literacy, mass media, and the web — although the last, not mentioned by Gray in his learned and appreciative survey of some “forms” underlying and represented in medieval English “popular literature,” might provide another environment for a kind of “underwood” like the premodern popular forms he studies. Then again, even modern social media might be a further step away from contact with the daily lives of everyday working people that Gray’s mostly orally performed materials indicate. The “simple forms” are modes like satire and legend, rhetorical nuggets like riddles and proverbs, and genres (as provisionally defined as the others) like song and drama. They necessarily survive only as traces in texts and canonical literature, but his respect for their scope, prevalence, and appeal allow him to evoke their lost kingdom. After quoting Dryden’s views about invective poems as “the underwood of satire rather than the timber trees,” Gray adds that medieval “popular satire and satirical practices form an extensive underwood, a kind of continuous ground-bass to more ambitious attempts at literary satire” (195).

This is the premise of his view of all of his forms, but he is constantly alert to interactions with high culture running in both directions. The grotesquely anti-Judaic Croxton Play of the Sacrament leads him to propose that although the doctrinal content comes from the “learned clerical tradition,” “the author seems to have set out to write a popular play” (234). The mysterious song “Mayden in the Mor Lay” is granted the possibility that no one singing it might have understood whatever deeper sense it has, if it does; but something about how the scribe recorded it — the abbreviations and disarrayed form — give Gray a “sense” there is more to it than rhythmic words and movement (227).

Few scholars would attempt a book like this, not only because it covers so much ground, but also because it skips over so much, with the confidence of wide learning. Cycle drama, for instance — proclaimed “the high point of medieval popular literature” (239) — is covered in under three pages. They are good pages, but lightly summarize the “simple” forms treated previously in the book that are found in the plays of salvation history. Whatever Gray pauses to appreciate is worth pondering closely, but those moments also sometimes quietly demur from most modern literary assessments. It startles to see the violently anti-Judaic Croxton Play of the Sacrament enjoyed for its “satiric comedy” with “moments of melodrama and fantastic comic disarray” (234). But is this not perhaps closer to the views of the original audiences than more morally repelled modern responses? Elsewhere he comments on Renaissance repugnance for sexually explicit traditional riddles and proverbs. The book is in part an exercise in what used to be called the history of taste. One of Gray’s closing points is the rapid postmedieval loss of status of his “simple forms,” relegated first to the rural and urban poor, then to children (243).

The word “essays” in the subtitle suggests provisional forays in a trackless underwood, but the chapters, including two on the problem of defining “popular” and the movements between oral and literate culture, make this a fairly comprehensive guide to popular medieval English literature (a new anthology of which is needed, he usefully suggests). The details may numb some beginners, and a few losses of text don’t help: “Bower’s” comments on Robin Hood are twice recalled (81, 85) but never cited or quoted (this must be Walter Bower’s continuation of John of Fordun’s Scotichronicon); an unknown “episode” from the revolt of 1381 is similarly visible only as a reminder (197). The book sometimes seems distant from current scholarship; the Records of Early English Drama are mentioned “now,” as if they are a recent endeavor (232n). A view by E. K. Chambers (1903) is similarly allowed a “now” (231). But this represents a major study, all the more valuable for its currently rare attention to a vast and increasingly forgotten continent.