Chaucer and the Energy of Creation. The Design and the Organization of the Canterbury Tales by Edward I. Condren

Abstract

REVIEWS race, class, and gender) in the processes through which the world is represented in order to be understood and controlled—these processes have never been out of play, and most certainly are very much in play in precisely the historical realm that has served to assert the contrary. Amid the intellectual wealth of this volume it seems greedy to ask for more, but I do wish for two things. First of all, I regret that the volume did not have room for the work of at least one social historian: a discussion of the malleable and continuously negotiated genealogical identities of the Welsh Marcher families, for example, would have contributed immensely to the book’s important presentation of the fluid categories of identity in border territories. I wish, too, that the book had not limited itself to the twelfth and fourteenth centuries, each of which, after all, has already staked claims to versions of modernity, the famous twelfth century renaissance for the one, and the equally famous collapse of the even more famous medieval synthesis for the other. Indeed certain tendencies in New Historicist criticism have already begun to push the border of modernity back to the fourteenth century and beyond and thus to saddle the early Middle Ages with all the theoretical work that used to be done by the Middle Ages as a whole. It seems to me now that it is very much time for a new examination of those early medieval centuries. Robert M. Stein Purchase College and Columbia University Edward I. Condren. Chaucer and the Energy of Creation. The Design and the Organization of the Canterbury Tales. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1999. Pp. viii, 296. $49.95. It is somewhat disconcerting to find this book opening with a sentence whose banality is further damned by defective punctuation: ‘‘What could be more medieval than the Canterbury Tales’’ (p. 1). Nor does the rest of the paragraph enable the reader to decide whether a question mark or an exclamation mark would best represent the author’s intention . A pity, because the weak beginning is followed by many passages of fine writing displaying Edward Condren’s mastery of the epigram: thus, his description of KnT as a ‘‘balanced ideal of passion and reason’’ 543 ................. 8972$$ CH21 11-01-10 12:23:12 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER (p.50), or his declaration that ‘‘Art often presents a brilliant alternative to life, but it never provides a substitute’’ (p. 112). Most of this volume is a straightforward critical discussion of CT that will prove stimulating to students, though there is little, other than Condren’s tripartite division, that will be new to scholars. The introduction , with two sections reflecting the title and subtitle (‘‘The Energy of Creation,’’ pp. 1–11, and ‘‘The Organization of the CT,’’ pp. 12–22), puts forward a number of thought-provoking ideas to explain the following division. The rest of the book is divided into three parts: part 1 examines Fragments 1 and 2 (the sequence of tales is that of the Riverside Chaucer); part 2, Fragments 3–5; and part 3, Fragments 6–10. Most tales are discussed in depth, with the exception of SNT and ManT (Fragment 8 is barely mentioned), but there is no conclusion to match the introduction, which would have rounded off the argument. Despite the almost universal opinion that this somewhat loose collection of tales was unfinished and incomplete at the time of the poet’s death, it is a significant element in Condren’s argument that Chaucer had gone as far as he wanted and written all he intended, that he put the stories into final order before adding the Retraction, and that the Ellesmere manuscript faithfully maintains Chaucer’s ordering of the tales. This is crucial, since Condren’s three divisions of CT, and his interpretation of their function, depend for their justification on this and no other order. Many will see this as a misguided attachment to a sequence that Chaucer may not have chosen, or may not have intended to be final; indeed, Condren himself thinks that ‘‘Chaucer was considering both arrangements’’ (p. 75). In spite of this, the author...