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

Abstract

REVIEWS dialects and genres. Benson has already prepared a printed lemmatized concordance to The Riverside Chaucer, and other scholars are working with him to prepare similar concordances for Langland, Gower, Hoccleve, and others. Benson's witty, self-deprecating essay manages both to convey a great deal of information and to suggest how critically useful such work can prove. Computers have long promised to provide reliable and nonimpressionis­ tic means of stylistic, lexical, morphological, and syntactic comparisons between reliably attributed texts and texts whose authorship is unknown. Stephen R. Reimer reports on research in progress in which sets of three 500-word selections are analyzed from each ofthe following texts: The Siege ofThebes, The Fall ofPrinces, Confessio Amantis, and Chaucer's Knight's Tale. Each was tested for word frequencies, relative word lengths, rhyme-word patterning, and other morphological features, using LitStats, the Oxford Concordance Program, and TACT. The textbase at the time he drafted his report was too small for meaningful results, but he is encouraged to think that tests can be devised for distinguishing authorial fingerprints for attri­ bution studies. Thomas Bestul describes ongoing work, under the general editorship of Robert Correale, to provide a replacement for the old Bryan and Dempster Sources and Analogues ofChaucer's Canterbury Tales (1941), especially his portion on The Monk's Tale. He makes a powerful case that a printed one- or two-volume set will be expensive to produce, that, even so, some sources and analogues are too long to be usefully printed, and that it would be most useful to scholars to prepare a hypertextually linked elec­ tronic textbase. One can only hope that he will convince his collaborators of the wisdom of that mode of publication, for it will at once be more complete, more usable, more easily updated, and far less expensive than a printed text. The volume closes with a thoughtful "Afterwords" summary statement by Patricia Eberle, an organizer of this unusually fruitful conference. HOYT N. DUGGAN University of Virginia SETH LERER. Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late­ Medieval England. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993. Pp. xii, 309. $39.50. Lerer's aim in this book is twofold: to analyze how Chaucer was interpreted by fifteenth-century readers and to show how the responses ofthose readers 229 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER formed Chaucer's identity as author, "laureate," and "father" of English poetry. The broad selection of readers he studies includes not only the poets, from Clanvowe through Skelton, who adapted Chaucer, but also the scribes, editors, and anthologizers who transmitted his work. According to Lerer, these readers were awed by what they perceived as Chaucer's ''tmas­ sailable authority," and they defined their relationship to Chaucer by cast­ ing themselves in the roles of Chaucerian characters who were subject to the abuse of readers or to the authority of fathers, sources, or auctores: the Clerk, the Squire, Geffrey, and Adam Scriveyn. By dramatizing these rela­ tionships of authority and subordination in his writings, Chaucer, in effect, provided the tools for constructing his own legend. Though steeped in New Historicist methodology, Chaucer and His Readers is, in certain respects, curiously old-fashioned. Given the abundant interest in "Chaucerians" manifest in the publications and conferences of the past six or seven years, it seems odd that Lerer should feel compelled to justify his subject matter to those who might accuse him of having "dis­ placed the great for the ephemeral, the lasting for the transitory" (p. 5). His defensiveness stems from the conviction he shares with generations of scholars that he is indeed treating second-rate writers, disciples "admit­ tedly unworthy of [Chaucer's} mantle" (p. 3). For Lerer, Lydgate, Clan­ vowe, and Hoccleve are "poetasters" (p. 119) laboring under the weight of Chaucer's authority: "As children to the father, apprentices to the master, or aspirants before the laureate, those who would read and write after the poet share in the shadows of the secondary" (p. 3). Of Lydgate and other members of the early-fifteenth-century "Chaucer cult" he writes: Their "myths of performance," ... and the creation of the narrative personae who enact them, are a far cry from the...