Chaucer and Array: Patterns of Costume and Fabric Rhetoric in The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and Other Works by Laura F. Hodges (review)

Abstract

LAURA F. HODGES, Chaucer and Array: Patterns of Costume and Fabric Rhetoric in The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and Other Works. Chaucer Studies Vol. 42. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2014. Pp. xi, 232. isbn: 978-1-8438-4368-9. $99.Laura Hodges has spent much of her scholarly career studying medieval clothing, particularly what she calls costume rhetoric (the sociological and economic implications of medieval dress). Two of her previous books have explored this topic in a more limited way by covering the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, where Hodges cataloged the variety of Chaucer's techniques in depicting clothing but could not determine an overarching pattern in Chaucer's artistic choices. However, in Chaucer and Array, Hodges knits together her earlier work and expands upon it by analyzing Chaucer's descriptions of clothing in the entirety of his writings. In particular, Hodges argues that when we examine Chaucer's writings collectively, he reveals several tendencies in his depictions of wardrobe going beyond mere characterization; these range from meeting genre expectations, to subverting or reversing those same expectations, to creating comic incongruity. The genre of the particular work influences which strategy Chaucer will employ.Hodges is meticulous and thorough. Her book's copious footnotes sometimes threaten to eclipse the entire page, but her writing style is uncluttered by jargon and her arguments are always cogent and careful in their claims. Although Hodges occasionally nods to Michael Camille, Carolyn Dinshaw, and Lorraine Stock in her footnotes, her explications focus less on gender politics and medieval sexuality than one might expect, given the content of the tales. Instead, her readings will be of special benefit to scholars interested in the semiotics of clothing, materialist criticism, and medieval expectations of genre. For the most part, as she explores these topics, her mission is one of augmentation rather than revolution; she usually provides new information that supports older understandings of the text rather than radically seeking to revise how we read a given work. A notable exception to that tendency is her rebuttal of some of the more dated annotations in the standard scholarly text of Chaucer's works, The Riverside Chaucer published in 1987, where Hodges is quick to point out unhelpful, incomplete, or potentially misleading understandings of clothing terminology.In Chaucer and Array, the most thorough explorations are of Chaucer's Knight's Tale, Troilus and Criseyde, The Clerk's Tale, The Miller's Tale, and Sir Thopas, each of which has its own chapter of discussion. …