Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late-Medieval England by Seth Lerer

The Walking Dead in Chaucer's <i>Knight's Tale</i>

This essay is inspired both by an increasing disciplinary contention that Chaucerians engage with popular culture and by a refreshed critical interest (reflected in the burgeoning field of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) in sharing pedagogical innovations and interests with peers within a public forum.2 Notwithstanding lingering professional suspicions about the value of the popular, engagement with popular culture involves the need both to better communicate Chaucer’s aesthetic distinction to the culture at large and to embrace the popular in our teaching. This essay offers a brief meditation on the value of the popular and offers two theoretical approaches that one might use to introduce the study of Chaucer’s popular constructions into the classroom. I suggest, in short, that Chaucer’s reproduction in popular culture has both pedagogical and critical value—both as interpretations of his poetry as it is adapted to

For those Chaucerians who anticipated Brian Helgeland's A Knight's Tale as a faithful screen version of Chaucer's Knight's Tale, the film must surely disappoint. Although a knight does indeed joust to win a lady, there is little connection—apart from the title—between this delightfully anachronistic fairy tale and Chaucer's sobering meditation on the inadequacies of human and divine justice. One of Chaucer's favorite premises—that "gentilesse" is determined by "vertuous lyvyng" rather than "heigh parage"—does appear to be a thematic touchstone insofar as the eponymous peasant knight believes in fair play and mercy and therefore finally vanquishes the cynical, cheating aristocrat. But the simple dichotomy between secular good (represented by a young, blond, ambitious underdog) and evil (the older, experienced enemy of democracy dressed in black) so dear to modern film audiences is quite alien to Chaucer's sensibility, at least in his Knight's Tale, in which the point is that neither Palamon nor Arcite is more deserving of the earthly happiness represented by Emily. Any comparison seems specious, however, since although the film is ostensibly inspired by Chaucer, Helgeland's version can only be described, in film parlance, as a very loose adaptation of the first Canterbury tale (notwithstanding Geoff Chaucer's declaration at the end of the film that he "will write some of this story down").

Reviewed by: Wisdom and Chivalry: Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Medieval Political Theory Robert Emmett Finnegan S. H. Rigby. Wisdom and Chivalry: Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Medieval Political Theory. Leiden: Brill, 2009. Pp. xvi, 329. €119.00; $169.00. Wisdom and Chivalry is a deeply researched and closely argued piece of historical criticism. Stephen Rigby chooses as his analytical tool for The Knight's Tale Giles of Rome's De Regimine Principum, a mirror for princes composed circa 1280 for the future Philip IV of France. Giles, a student of Aquinas, synthesizes the political/religious ideas of his—and Chaucer's—day with respect to the personal and public qualities a ruler ought to possess, and demonstrate. The De Regimine, which shows the [End Page 365] influence of Aristotle and Plato, Cicero and Seneca, survives in some 350 manuscripts, mostly Latin, some vernacular. John Trevisa translated it into English; Thomas of Gloucester, Richard II's uncle, possessed a Latin copy. It is, then, an appropriate touchstone for a study of this sort. Indeed, a reader/listener who had internalized Giles's ideas might well find that “in idealizing Duke Theseus . . . The Knight's Tale seeks to offer a confirmation of the ‘dominant’ ideology of late medieval England” (285) and that “Duke Theseus embodies the virtue which political theorists demanded a ruler should possess as an individual, as the head of a household, and as a sovereign ruler” (276). Rigby structures his analysis in terms of this tripartite division: Part I (“Ethics: The Good Rule of the Self”) deals with Theseus's personal ethics; Part II (“Economics and Politics: The Good Rule of Others”) shows these personal ethics in public action; Part III (“The First Mover and the Good Rule of the Cosmos”) views Theseus's rule of self and others in the wider context of Jupiter's/the Christian God's dominion over the universe. Rigby, then, evaluates Theseus's conduct from the microcosmic-personal to the macrocosmic-universal. There is no ambiguity here. By every measure, and in all circumstances, Theseus comports himself as Giles, and political theorists roughly contemporary with Chaucer— Dante, Boccaccio, John Gower—think an ideal ruler should. We learn, for example, that the duke had every right to send Palamon and Arcite to prison forte et dure and set the “pilours” on the fallen Thebans; he had shown his banner on the march against Creon, and this gesture counted to Chaucer's contemporaries not only as a formal declaration of war but also as an indication that little, or no, quarter need be expected. Later we discover that Saturn, whose intervention concludes the strife in heaven, can be understood as representing the wisdom of old age. We are also told that Theseus's First Mover lecture is informed not only by Boethius but by current ideas of the Christian God's control of the universe and everything in it. There are numerous such interpretations, all positive; Rigby consistently sees the duke's actions as ideal and exemplary. But this need not necessarily be so, even for a reader steeped in the De Regimine. A Gilesian reader might recognize Theseus's right to conduct himself as he does on the Theban battlefield, but yet question the charity of his so doing. Given the dynamics of the poem, such a reader might well find it odd that Jupiter, who attempts to resolve the contention in [End Page 366] heaven—“Juppiter was bisy it to stente” (2442)—signally fails. If our Gilesian could trace the semantic range of “bisy” and “stente,” he would find, perhaps, the terms suggesting that Jupiter worked for a solution over a significant period of time and became worried and distressed when he did not succeed. Saturn's malevolent self-characterization embodies the worst violence depicted on the walls of the temples of Mars, Venus, and Diana. Our Gilesian reader might find an in bono interpretation here a very large order indeed, and discover little in the text to warrant an assertion that “the agency of Saturn, in resolving the conflict between Mars and Venus, can actually be seen as an instrument of Jupiter's power” (269). Again, our Gilesian might...

Reviewed by: Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England by Julie Orlemanski Rebecca Krug Julie Orlemanski. Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. Pp. ix, 333. $69.95. Julie Orlemanski's Symptomatic Subjects demonstrates that representations of physical bodies as "symptomatic"—that is, subject to both decay, death, and sickness and, also, to interpretation—were central to late medieval English imaginative writing. The book ranges with great energy over well-known works such as Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Henryson's Testament of Cresseid; marches through readings of less-familiar texts, including tales from the Gesta Romanorum, Hoccleve's Series, and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament; and runs through excerpts from medical works by Arnau of Vilanova, John Arderne, Guy de Chauliac, and Roger of Parma. The ambitious scope of the project—bodies, medicine, and causation—is somewhat overstated but exciting. Through her dynamic readings of texts that feature descriptions of bodily processes, Orlemanski shows that late medieval literary writers had come to see literary production as a space in which embodiment, textuality, and signification could be explored. Both bodies and written texts had become subject to interpretation and narration in late medieval England. Orlemanski explains that her book "tells the story of how embodied subjectivity was narrated in its entangled relation to the world in the era of medicine's unprecedented textual vitality. In that, it offers one approach to the phenomenology of medieval selfhood, or, what it was [End Page 429] like, within the era's mix of discourses, to reflect on both having and being a body" (2). The book traces patterns of causation and embodiment and draws a picture of late medieval textual etiology as a force that can be observed at work in literary writing. It defines etiology as concerned with "projects of explanatory invention" that explore causation in multiple ways. Like late medieval readers, whom the book's author describes as "bricoleurs of etiology" (3), Orlemanski herself gathers up literary writings representing physical ailments to create a collage of late medieval literature and its relation to medical/literary causality. The etiology that Symptomatic Subjects finds most interesting is generic. Following two synthetic chapters that trace a broad history of medieval medicine, the book is composed of six chapters focused on literary works. These chapters develop a narrative about the representation of bodies and generic expression in the period. As this is the heart of the book, I first outline chapters 3 through 8. The discussion of genre in these chapters is underwritten by recent scholarship on the link between narration and medicine. It is rooted, first, in the appearance in medical discourse of satire. Taking up a point from Douglas Gray's analysis of Henryson's "Sum Practysis of Medecyne" linking jargon and satire, Orlemanski produces readings of Henryson and the Croxton Play of the Sacrament that underscore the difficulty of reconciling the linguistic and the material. From satire she turns to exemplary stories, which she sees as functioning like medicine because both involve judgments concerning relationships between the general and the particular. Such adjudication, she observes, was subject to revision and, in some cases, incoherence. This, then, becomes the subject of a section about romance conventions in Chaucer's Knight's Tale and Henryson's Testament of Cresseid. Both texts focus on dying or diseased bodies and can be seen as doing so in relation to reflections on narrative closure. She turns then to the narration of self in Hoccleve's Series and Margery Kempe's Book. The Hoccleve chapter enacts Orlemanski's claims most effectively as it demonstrates that the Series can be seen to wrestle with "the self's inability to master its own materiality and the signifier's incapacity to guarantee its own meaning" (220). Her discussion of Kempe focuses on the Book's representation of involuntary crying, discussed in all its physicality, and movements between first- and third-person narration. The outline above demonstrates the complexity of the book. Because this is the case, I describe two chapters in detail below to provide a sense [End Page...

Not the least attraction of Professor Wilson's recent interpretation of Chaucer's Knight's Tale appearing in these pages is his opening statement: “The Knight's Tale is a masterpiece.” Very few students of Chaucer would take exception to it, and furthermore it expresses admirably the attitude of scholars who have recently published studies of that tale. There has long been agreement that The Canterbury Tales is a masterpiece, and the General Prologue is likewise so regarded. But following it and the Knight's Tale without a break-in fact with the closest kind of linkage Chaucer used-are the Miller's Prologue and Tale, the Reeve's Prologue and Tale, the Cook's Prologue, and fifty-seven lines of the Cook's unfinished tale. This 4422-line group of tales and links (designated Fragment I by Professor Robinson whose text I am using) is more than a repository for one or two masterpieces: it is a masterpiece itself. As there is no need to press the claims of the General Prologue or the Knight's Tale, much of what follows will be a discussion of the other parts of Fragment I, though not with the purpose of declaring them individually masterpieces. The aim is to discover the artistic integrity of the group as a whole. Professor William Frost in another recent interpretation of the Knight's Tale' stops just short of a similar purpose. To support his interpretation he cites briefly several features of the Miller's Tale. The procedure here, however, will not be to argue for one or another interpretation of the Knight's Tale by reference to other tales but to discover how carefully Chaucer has interconnected all the parts of the group and to demonstrate if possible how in this group as in any work with a unified theme the whole transcends the sum of the parts.

Forsworn and Fordone:Arcite as Oath-Breaker in the Knight's Tale Catherine A. Rock Chaucer's Knight's Tale is a story of chivalry and of romance, a tale of two captive knights who fall in love with the same maiden, with disastrous results. Palamon and Arcite are virtually identical, yet in the end one dies and the other marries Emelye. Why does the adventure close in this seemingly arbitrary way? Does Arcite deserve to die in such a gruesome fashion? Throughout the tale both young men act, for the most part, according to the rules of chivalry. Underlying the tale, however, are issues of brotherhood, trouthe, and loyalty. Although Palamon upholds these knightly duties fairly consistently,1 Arcite is guilty of a number of transgressions that account, I argue, for his ultimate fate of death after winning the battle for the maiden. From the beginning of the Knight's Tale, the Knight is at pains to demonstrate the virtual equality of Palamon and Arcite. The two knights are discovered after a battle lying in a "taas of bodyes dede" (I 1005).2 In such a configuration, it is difficult to distinguish individuals at all. When the pillagers separate the bodies, however, they discover these two lying together, wearing the same heraldic device (I 1011–12). G. F. Beltz explains that knights of the same household are dressed similarly so that, "in the heat of battle, the enemy might mistake one for the other" and the knights would thus share the same perils.3 The two knights are never clearly differentiated physically; indeed, the appearance of the young men is entirely omitted. Robert R. Edwards refers to the two as "two versions of a single figure,"4 and Lee Patterson says they are "indistinguishable at the level of worth."5 They become differentiated only through their love of Emelye, the sister-in-law of Theseus. Besides being royal cousins, Palamon and Arcite have strengthened their responsibility to each other by swearing an oath of brotherhood (I 1131–38). The importance of this oath cannot be overestimated, according to an incisive study by Robert Stretter. Stretter notes that the pledge is "a legally binding oath of mutual support," and that, because such an oath does not appear in Boccaccio's Teseida (the source of [End Page 416] Chaucer's tale), Chaucer's addition must be considered significant.6 Stretter emphasizes the fact that medieval readers would have recognized the brotherhood bond "as shorthand for a (theoretically) indestructible male friendship."7 Chaucer writes of such bonds elsewhere in the Canterbury Tales, where they are crucial factors in the stories.8 The narrator Knight does not dwell on this oath: after the breaking of the oath, Palamon mentions it only once again, in the grove (I 1583). There are enough other oaths in the tale, however, so that verbal contracts—and this one in particular—are never long out of the minds of the audience. No one other than the two knights is apparently aware of this particular instance of oath-breaking. Significantly, Palamon does not mention it at the crucial moment when he confesses both his and Arcite's transgressions to Theseus. He evidently considers the oath to be a private matter between the two knights, symbolic of the bonds they share, and something they must resolve themselves. The oath of brotherhood was closely related to the oath of knighthood. John of Salisbury writes of "the binding sacrament of an oath" that specified the duties of soldiers, who were "to pour out their blood for their brothers . . . and, if need be, to lay down their lives,"9 a concept that supports the idea of knights dressing alike in order to confuse the enemy in battle. Ramón Lull, in his thirteenth-century Book of the Order of Chivalry, notes that "those who uphold the order of chivalry should not engage in false swearing and untrue oaths."10 Oaths are part of the code of chivalry and are to be taken very seriously.11 Richard Firth Green declares that the oath is commonly a key factor in Middle English metrical romances, and that "stress on the virtue of absolute fidelity to one...

Reviewed by: Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England by Julie Orlemanski Aylin Malcolm (bio) Julie Orlemanski, Symptomatic Subjects: Bodies, Medicine, and Causation in the Literature of Late Medieval England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019, x + 333pp. $69.95 cloth. The events of 2020 revealed the importance of effective communication in healthcare and the potential for epidemics to inspire new narrative projects, concretizing decades of research on the intersections between literature and medicine. Though its publication anticipated these developments by several months, Julie Orlemanski's Symptomatic Subjects is an important contribution to such discussions and to the study of premodern medicine, a field generally dominated by historical methods. Orlemanski offers a sophisticated new perspective on the entanglements of literature and phisik—a Middle English term that includes both academic approaches to healing and more diffuse local practices—in late medieval England. Her deliberately anachronistic use of "symptom," which she defines as "a somatic disturbance that … provokes interpretation," speaks to the parallels between diagnosing a body and analyzing a text; both projects require one to interpret visible signs in the context of larger semiotic systems, a fact recognized by many medieval writers (p. 16). As her title suggests, the book also considers what Orlemanski calls "embodied subjectivity," characterized by the tension between physical susceptibility and the medieval emphasis on free will (p. 2). Orlemanski is particularly interested in individuals who reflect on their own bodies or pathologies, thereby addressing the "gap between one's materiality and one's experience, or between having and being a body" (p. 3). While Symptomatic Subjects will appeal most to those specializing in the late Middle Ages, its rigorous engagement with both literary criticism and the history of medicine is likely to interest a range of scholars. An evident strength of the book is its careful close readings, which address canonical texts (e.g., Geoffrey Chaucer's Knight's Tale) alongside others that are often overlooked (e.g., John Lydgate's "Dietary;" Robert Henryson's "Sum Practysis of Medecyne"). Many of these textual interpretations include studies of individual manuscripts; in particular, the Wound Man (a standard diagram of the various injuries that a physician might treat) in Wellcome Library MS 290 serves as an emblem of Orlemanski's project, embodying her interests in the relationships between particulars and general causes, as well as the tension between human agency and vulnerability. Each text or object is contextualized with generous references, such that the reader trained in a different field will likely require no further notes. Indeed, while the book has a clear overarching narrative, it often recapitulates essential information in multiple chapters; each chapter might therefore be read independently without additional context, a welcome feature in the age of digital downloads. [End Page 231] Structured as four parts of two chapters each, Symptomatic Subjects progresses from an overview of medieval medical knowledge to its effects on literary genres, plot, and voice, with a brief coda on the early modern afterlives of phisik. Orlemanski begins by surveying medicine in late medieval England, where the absence of formal medical institutions produced a diverse constellation of beliefs and practices. Chapter two delves more deeply into four aspects of phisik: the etiological schemata through which physicians ascribed medical conditions to causes, the decentralized and heterogeneous character of medical authority, the tendency for physicians to read bodies as signs with identifiable meanings, and the relationships between content and layout in medical manuscripts. Both chapters offer not only useful information about medical practices, but also perceptive analyses of medical writing, as Orlemanski applies her considerable critical skills to texts not often read as literature. The next two chapters examine satire, which often criticized the obscure jargon and earthly materialism of medical texts, and exempla, or short anecdotes illustrating moral principles, a very common narrative form during the late Middle Ages. The fourth chapter's comparisons between exemplary narratives and medical case studies are especially enlightening, providing clear evidence of the fluid relationship between medieval literature and medicine, and thus of the importance of Orlemanski's work. Central to this chapter is Orlemanski's notion of the "etiological imagination," or the creative process of envisioning causation with...

Research Article| March 01 1973 Order and the Noble Life in Chaucer's Knight's Tale? Kathleen A. Blake Kathleen A. Blake Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Modern Language Quarterly (1973) 34 (1): 3–19. https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-34-1-3 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Kathleen A. Blake; Order and the Noble Life in Chaucer's Knight's Tale?. Modern Language Quarterly 1 March 1973; 34 (1): 3–19. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00267929-34-1-3 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu nav search search input Search input auto suggest search filter Books & JournalsAll JournalsModern Language Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. Copyright © 1973 by Duke University Press1973 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal Issue Section: Articles You do not currently have access to this content.

Reviewed by: Chaucer and Array: Patterns of Costume and Fabric Rhetoric in The Canterbury Tales, Troilus and Criseyde, and Other Works by Laura F. Hodges L. Kip Wheeler 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. Some of them, such as her chapter on Troilus and Criseyde, derive from earlier versions published as journal articles. In her concluding chapter, Hodges also touches much more briefly on The Complaint of Mars, The Legend of Good Women, The Parliament of Fowls, The Pardoner’s Tale, The Wife of Bath’s Tale, and several other shorter poems, but the diminished number of references to clothing in these works gives her less material to stitch to the fabric of her argument. Hodges also covers an additional bonus topic, one not evident from the book’s title. In the material in the last half of her first chapter, Hodges explores the evidence for historical practices in which rulers or government officials would decorate buildings [End Page 154] or streets with cloth adornments and street drapery for royal processions, coronations, tournaments, and other official events. She makes clear the sheer scope and expense of these cloth decorations, and she includes a partial timeline of such processions in Appendices A and B. These particular customs have received little in-depth study from historians and even less attention from literary critics prior to this book. While Hodges cannot be comprehensive in her treatment here, the details she provides make it clear they are worthy of further investigation. The book includes eight color plates and eleven black-and-white pen sketches as supplemental materials; these are helpful examples but are not necessary to understand Hodges’ arguments. One reference resource lacking in Chaucer and Array that scholars might find useful would...

Reviewed by: The Gift of Narrative in Medieval England by Nicholas Perkins Walter Wadiak nicholas perkins, The Gift of Narrative in Medieval England. Manchester Medieval Literature and Culture Vol. 39. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2021. Pp. xi, 270. isbn: 978-1526139917. $120. While medieval English romances have inspired readings in terms of 'the gift' since at least the early 90s, Perkins ambitiously reads the entire genre as structured around an ideal of generous exchange. In this remarkable study, the gift figures as nothing less than the founding gesture of romance and the impulse that drives these stories forward, in the process drawing readers themselves into the cycle of generosity and giving rise to responses in the form of new texts. Perkins concedes near the outset that such an approach might seem 'dreamily optimistic' (p. 31), yet the book feels bracing and even revelatory in its insistence that we attend to the ethical work of a genre that has often been dismissed as mere ideology. Chapter One reads a group of early romances (about a figure called Horn) as enacting the delay that makes the gift as opposed to the commodity. In romance, Perkins observes, it is often 'in the very delay or frustration of the return, in the gift's continuing journey, that narrative suspense and pleasure … is contained' (p. 44). The argument here is structuralist in its emphasis on the larger narrative picture, but Perkins adroitly zooms in to focus on, for instance, how the Romance of Horn plays on the idea of Horn as both a found object on the beach (le truvé el graver) as well as an inscribed or graven textual object, with a plausible pun on truver as poetic making (p. 33). Chapter Two extends the argument to the romances housed in the celebrated Auchinleck manuscript, though the links here are somewhat looser and more thematic, as Perkins admits. The last half of the chapter explores Sir Gawain and the Green Knight as a story in which, as Perkins reminds us, 'the forme to the fynisment foldes ful selden', and in doing so he challenges what he sees as overly determined readings of the poem's many gifts and games. Perkins' writing here and elsewhere is frequently delightful, as when he describes Gawain, setting out for what he thinks will be his doom all trussed up in his sumptuous armor, as 'gift-wrapped for delivery' (p. 98). Those buoyant touches suit an argument that registers awareness of the darker possibilities lurking in romance but ultimately invites us to read the genre in recuperative terms. Chapters Four and Five, dealing with Chaucerian texts, feel a bit less fresh, but here, too, there is nuanced interpretation, as when Perkins remarks upon the limits [End Page 110] of our knowledge about the small keepsakes that Troilus and Criseyde exchange (as opposed to the public and ostentatious gifts—e.g., that heart-shaped brooch!—that tend to draw readers' attention). The notion of 'distributed agency,' first introduced in Chapter Four, helps Perkins to complicate the boundary between person and object in ways that bear upon gender-focused readings of, for instance, Chaucer's Knight's Tale, while Chapter Five outlines an intriguing notion of performative speech-acts as gifts, a return with interest on previous uses of this kind of 'citational' language. Since this is a book about how narrative returns with interest in subsequent retellings, both within and between texts, it makes sense that the final chapter, on Lydgate's Troy Book, is the richest in both close reading and theoretical heft. Hector's 'cyborg corpse' (p. 212), preserved by King Priam (via a weirdly intricate system of gold tubes) in a bid to raise the morale of the Trojans, becomes in Perkins' incisive reading an 'aureate body' (p. 228) that speaks both to the elaborate quality of Lydgate's own writing and to the blurred lines between people and things in Lydgate's narrative (this blurring being, as Perkins reminds us, a hallmark of the gift). That troubling of the boundaries between the human and the non-human is central to Perkins' effort to imagine what he calls a 'speculative anthropology,' one that might allow us to...

Besides thinking about the adaptation of medieval literature in modern film, we could, I think, achieve more creatively and critically by trying to imagine the prefiguration of cinematographic expression in medieval literature. Along with an examination of the literal representation of cinematic experience in an early twentieth-century film about the Middle Ages, Paul Wegener's Der Golem, I present a discussion of the presaging of cinematic technique in the ekphrasis of Mars' Temple in Part 3 of Chaucer's Knight's Tale in order to more fully theorize the relations of film and the Middle Ages using the tactics of narratology, semiotics, historicism and Deleuzian (schizo)analysis.

Introduction

The Monk's Tale Terry Jones St. Edmund Hall, Oxford I'M ONE OF THAT grnwing band of awkw,ud rnstomm who don't think that The Monk's Tale is a complete and utter disaster. I think it hits its target right on the nose. I simply do not buy the idea that Chaucer realized he'd made a mistake in embarking on this series of "tedious and repetitive tragedies" and so has the Knight cut them short.1 Authors don't do that sort of thing. If a writer thinks he's produced something that stinks, he doesn't get his other characters to criticize it-he simply doesn't publish it. The fact that many modern readers have been so ready to agree with the objections to The Monk:r Tale voiced by the Knight and the Host might be a good indicator that we are missing something-an essential perspective on the Tale and what Chaucer is doing in it. The Monk's Tale Is a Reply to The Knight's Tale At the end of The Knight's Tale_, Chaucer has the Host turn to the Monk and say: "Now telleth ye, sir Monk, if that ye konne, / Somewhat to quite with the Knyghtes tale" (MilP 3118-19). Either you have to be­ lieve that Chaucer wrote things for no reason or you have to agree that he has deliberately set up the Monk to somehow "quit" (that is "repay" or "match") The Knight's Tale. Of course the drunken Miller interrupts and quits The Knight's Tale in his own way, but when the Monk does finally get around to telling his tale, the Knight appears to get rather agitated by it, and cuts him shore. This in itself suggests that the Monk has indeed "quit" the Knight in some manner-and the Knight doesn't like it one bit! 1 R. M. Lumiansky, OfSandry Folk: The Dramatic Principle in the Canterbury Tales (Aus­ tin: University of Texas Press, 1955), p. 103. 387 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER The main problem, as I see it, is that most readers are convinced that the Knight is a "parfit gentil knight"-beyond criticism-and they therefore assume that his Tale is a noble and philosophical story that somehow probably also represents Chaucer's own point of view. This means that when the Knight breaks his own self-imposed promise-"I wol nat letten eek noon of this route; I Lat every felawe telle his tale aboute" (KnT 889-90)-and interrupts the Monk, most modern readers assume he does so because, like them, he finds The Monk'.r Tale boring. Of course, a lot of modern readers also find The Knight'.r Tale boring, so that's a bit of a problem in itself. Various critics have also pointed out from time to time that The Knight'.r Tale has serious shortcomings as a philosophical statement.2 But, for some reason, people seem to be more prepared to believe that such shortcomings are Chaucer's rather than to question their deeply held belief that the Knight is, indeed, a "parfit gentil knyght." The Knight and The Monk's Tale Since the Monk is quitting the Knight, we can't understand what The Monk'.r Tale is getting at unless we understand what The Knight's Tale is about-although actually it's easier to say what The Knight'.r Tale isn't about. In the first place it is not a work of deep philosophy. The Knight himselfadmits that he has no interest in the metaphysical. When Arcite dies, the Knight comments (KnT 2809-15): His spirit chaunged hous and wente ther, As I cam nevere, I kan nat tellen wher. Therfore I scynte; I nam no divinistre; Ofsoules fynde I nat in this registre, Ne me ne list thilke opinions to telle Ofhem, though that they writen wher they dwelle. Arcite is coold, ther Mars his soule gye! What's this the Knight is saying? "I am no 'theologian.' I don't find anything about souls written in my 'register' (presumably a military 2 See, for example, Dale Underwood, "The First of the Canterbury...

The chapters in this book are chiefly concerned with English and Scottish writings of the 14th and 15th centuries. Those on Chaucer's Knight's Tale, Langland's second version, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and Henryson's Preaching of the Swallow belong together as attempts to clarify the meaning of particular poems from this period by explaining concepts or institutions which are more or less unfamiliar nowadays: the scheme of the three ages in Chaucer, the sequence sermon-confession-pilgrimage-pardon in Langland, honour and shame in Sir Gawain, and the virtue of prudence in Henryson. Of the other two chapters on Canterbury Tales, that on the Merchant's Tale represents a kind of ‘new criticism’ of Chaucer whereas the second which is on Sir Thopas indicates one way for ward for Chaucer criticism now, through the detailed study of his poetic language. The chapter on The Cloud of Unknowing and on the audience of Piers Plowman are both primarily concerned with questions of style. The remaining four chapters range more widely and they discuss the importance of context, the medieval poet's presentation of himself, the ‘nature ideal’ in thinking about the ages of man, and the integrity of the literal level in allegories.