Book Review: Pagans, Tartars, Moslems, and Jews in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Abstract

By Brenda Deen Schildgen. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2001. ISBN 0-8130-21073. Pp. 183. $59.95. No group of people could be more English than the company Geoffrey Chaucer reports he joined one April day at the Tabard Inn in Southwark; no purpose could have been more in keeping with the spirit of their age than the desire to go on pilgrimage. A surprising number of tales they tell, however, are set in times or places where Christianity was unknown or unaccepted. The Knight's story unfolds mostly in Theseus's Athens; the principal characters in his son the Squire's romance are Tartars. The Franklin's tale takes place in pre-Christian Brittany, the Wife of Bath's in an era before friars had driven fairies their haunts. The Man of Law's Constance suffers among Muslims in Syria and heathens in England; the Prioress's litel clergeon is murdered by Jewes in Asia; the Second Nun recounts Cecilia's martyrdom in pagan Rome. In her new book Brenda Deen Schildgen argues that these tales from the margins play a central role in defining the ethos of The Canterbury Tales because in them Chaucer deliberate[d] on the grand rifts between the Christian or pagan past and [his] present and between other cultural worlds and the Latin Christian (2). In itself such a claim is not new; Schildgen's evaluation of it, however, is. She does not contend that Chaucer undertook his investigation of divergent philosophies and faiths for the purpose of confirming the truth of Christianity, as exegetical critics have done. Nor does she present the New Critics' Chaucer, bemused as much by the faults of Christians as by the virtues of those who are not. The Tales lack even this sort of tendentiousness, in which the ironic detachment that purchases Chaucer's tolerance of others' beliefs remains underwritten by his confidence in the rightness of his own. For Schildgen the Tales are rather an exercise in ethical speculation that takes place on truly neutral ground. When Chaucer inscribed the imagined practices of pagans, Muslims, Jews, and Tartars, he suspended the jurisdiction of Christian revelation, thereby motivating his readers to debate the validity of competing convictions by displaying the kinds of lives they inspired people to lead. The spirit of The Canterbury Tales, in other words, is ecumenical; the work generates moral meaning through dialogues conducted in an atmosphere of equal respect and solidaristic responsibility for everybody. These words are Jurgen Habermas, whose theory of discourse ethics and particularly his explanation of the of a community that lives by its principles, furnishes the ideas Schildgen deploys to situate her reading of Chaucer. If a society pledges to respect difference, it will inevitably find itself at odds with hegemonic truths of the day. Chaucer's sundry folk become such a polity by committing themselves to the give-and-take of their stories; in doing so, they perform the modernity of late fourteenth-century England. In the wake of the plague, a rising middle class;' and increasingly mobile workers, the collision and negotiation of their aspirations make visible the obsolescence of social codifications like the three estates. In their embrace of the adventitious and in their willingness to defy authority, Chaucer's pilgrims dramatize Ockham's contention that contingency lodges in every absolute or abstract formulation that human beings can comprehend. When so many around him were moved to engage the material world in all its particularity, Chaucer's decision to present the Parson's Jerusalem celestial as only one destination the road to truth can lead to carries the force of an ethical imperative. On the face of it, these contentions will seem intrinsically implausible to many Chaucerians. After all, in his one direct comment on the Tales, Chaucer recanted those that sownen into synne; the sin they list toward is Christian sin, and, no matter who takes the census, most of the stories Schildgen uses to build her case would be among the enditynges of worldly vanitees Chaucer calls his gyltes Even the defense he offers for having composed tales like the Knight's and the Wife's circumscribes these narratives within the orbit of his faith. …