Chaucer and War by John H. Pratt

Abstract

REVIEWS toms of their ancestors. Before that there was Madden, who made himself part of the aristocratic clique but also refused to go along with the lazy scholarship that had made Middle English editing a form of mediation between supplicant scholars and leisured patrons. He was a professional scholar who tried to live in the old world, and he provides a neat transition to the new world of professionalized and institutionalized scholarship, and of the more broadly based publishing societies that Furnivall whipped into existence with his exasperating energy. The rest of the story is familiar, but retold well. Matthews is aware of the ironic relevance of his study of the emergence of Middle English to its currently accelerating disappearance (except for Chaucer) from university syllabuses. He makes excellent use of the 1921 report ‘‘The Teaching of English in England’’ to show how Middle English, having successfully academicized itself, became marginal in society at large—which it had not been in Furnivall’s time. But Matthews is optimistic. As he says, more actual people read all this stuff than ever before, and, little by little, ‘‘Middle English studies might increase its sense of its own history’’ (p. 197). Derek Pearsall Harvard University John H. Pratt. Chaucer and War. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2000. Pp. xvi, 259. $42.50. Three decades ago John Burrow observed that a ‘‘lack of interest in fighting was typical of Ricardian poetry generally.’’ Even though Chaucer ’s Theseus and Troilus are warriors, he continues, ‘‘they fight off stage, and their prowess contributes little to our interest in them.’’ Despite Chaucer’s reticence on the subject, Pratt attempts to tease out the poet’s view of war, asking, ‘‘[W]as he a hawk or a dove or something in-between? . . . No one can maintain non-commitment for a lifetime’’ (p. xiii). Undoubtedly, Chaucer must have had opinions about the numerous battles and campaigns that occurred during his lifetime. As Pratt points out, he was associated with the court from an early age and many of his acquaintances engaged in warfare. He himself experienced the Hundred Years’ War, being taken prisoner near Rheims during the 581 ................. 8972$$ CH21 11-01-10 12:23:30 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER campaign of 1359–60, and he served on various diplomatic missions concerned with negotiations about martial conflicts. Nonetheless, Chaucer ’s opinions about war, as with so many other issues, remain elusive. Despite Pratt’s thorough discussion of the historical context of warfare contemporary with Chaucer’s texts, he does not succeed in countering Burrow’s observation nor in persuasively identifying the poet’s attitude toward war. Employing an ‘‘old’’ historical methodology, Pratt analyzes the military milieu in which Chaucer lived, the martial language he used in his poetry, and those narratives specifically involving warfare: Troilus and Criseyde as well as the Knight and the Squire in The General Prologue and their Tales. In chapter 1 Pratt tries to establish Chaucer’s attitude toward war by examining his life records. He cites Chaucer’s testimony in the Scrope-Grosvenor hearings, his connections with the royal court, and his friendships with men who had active military careers to argue that the poet must have had some familiarity with and opinions about warfare . Acknowledging that Chaucer did not write battle poetry nor advance to the rank of knight, Pratt argues that he ‘‘sublimated what interest he had in battles and the literature of war’’ (p. 11), probably for political expedience. Pratt concludes this chapter by admitting that the evidence from Chaucer’s life is ambiguous, but he speculates nonetheless about what the poet might have written had the circumstances been different. ‘‘But I need hardly point out that the same Chaucer who composed a poem to Henry IV in 1399 to plead for patronage might well, a few years later, have felt the urge to produce a panegyric to Henry V on the victory at Agincourt, if Chaucer had lived past 1415’’ (p. 11). Such speculation throughout this book diminishes the persuasiveness of Pratt’s argument and reveals his unstated premise; rather than asking a neutral question about whether the poet was a dove or a hawk, Pratt...