Chaucer’s Ovidian Arts of Love by Michael A. Calabrese

Abstract

REVIEWS and thus are "the expression of a body of ideas" (p. 123). Noting that Chaucer's techniques for characterization can be considerably more com­ plex than simply playing off conventional materials, Brown introduces calendar images of January portrayed as the two-faced god of antiquity who--in medieval depictions-becomes a solidly prosperous two-faced man, looking back on the past and forward to the future and intent on indulging himself in the seasonal activities of eating and drinking. The lavishness of January and May's wedding feast thus highlights how Chaucer draws on nature myths to enrich his portrayal ofJanuary. A number of formatting elements enhance the book's usefulness: ques­ tions precede and follow discussion ofthe text, helping to focus the reader's attention on relevant issues and guiding teachers interested in using this material with their students; an annotated bibliography at the end of each chapter functions as a ready resource for those wishing to meander further down the interpretive pathways the book has traced; a detailed index makes specific information easily accessible. Brown sees Chaucer's artistic purposes--entertaining his audience and encouraging dialogue on contemporary issues-as closely linked with the social milieu that gave him patronage. Although Brown's discussion-by virtue of the texts and images he selects-unavoidably leans more heavily in some directions than in others, he strives to facilitate analysis, to point toward fruitful avenues for exploration rather than to strain after definitive readings. In the spirit of Chaucer's own distaste for authoritative guides, Brown eschews the role of master-interpreter and presents his readers with a method that is adaptable to other passages and tales. Overall, his work helps students move quickly beyond the "roadside drama" approach and the focus on "realistic" detail; it directs them toward more contextual criti­ cal analysis. Readable and imaginative, it is a user-friendly resource for anyone seeking ro better understand Chaucer's compositional methods and to deepen acquaintance with a poet who prefers "open-ended debate rather than conclusive moral teaching" (p. 10). LILLIAN M. BISSON Marymount University MICHAEL A. CALABRESE. Chaucer's Ovidian Arts ofLove. Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 1994. Pp. x, 170. $29.95. Chaucer's Ovidian Arts ofLove presents a close reading of Chaucer's Troilus, The Wife of Bath's Prologue, and the Retraction. Professor Calabrese reads 183 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER these texts against the textual tradition he calls the "medieval Ovid," a tradition that encompasses Ovidian texts in context, an "extending web of scholastic and poetic texts, treatments and testimonies" (p. 3). In Cala­ brese's terms, it is Ovid-the-love-poet-the author of the Ars Amatoria, the Remedia Amoris, the Heroides, and the Amores-that Chaucer studied and rewrote. In addition, Calabrese focuses as well on Ovid's "civic perils"­ especially his exile, understood in the Middle Ages as imperial punishment for the lascivious content of the Ars Amatoria. The Ovidian commentary tradition, with its interest in the ethical interpretation of an author's "life" as well as "art," offered Chaucer a "model of the life of a lascivious poet who had to answer for his crimes" (p. 21). Calabrese posits that Chaucer, as a vernacular poet alongside Boccaccio and Jean de Meun, confronted the contradictory nature of medieval re­ sponses to Ovid's love poetry. Ovidian amatory texts were simultaneously central to the canon and to vernacular poetics yet frequently condemned for their seductive dangers, a condemnation that elides rhetorical and erotic appeal. Calabrese briefly analyzes an anonymous fourteenth-century poem, the Antiovidianus, as an example of a countertradition to the ethical recu­ peration of Ovid's art and life in the conventional accessus. For Calabrese, it is this contradictory response to Ovidian art and life, rhetoric and desire, that Chaucer negotiates in the erotic machinations of the Troilus, through the subject position of the Wife of Bath, and in the authorial self-con­ sciousness of the Retraction. In two chapters at the center of the book, Calabrese reads Chaucer's Troilus as a vernacular narrative exploration of the Ars Amatoria and the Remedia Amoris. In this schema, Pandarus becomes identified as the quint­ essential Ovidian...