Chaucer’s Prayers: Writing Christian and Pagan Devotion by Megan E. Murton

Abstract

Reviewed by: Chaucer’s Prayers: Writing Christian and Pagan Devotion by Megan E. Murton Jamie Fumo Megan E. Murton. Chaucer’s Prayers: Writing Christian and Pagan Devotion. Chaucer Studies. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2020. Pp. viii, 180. $99.00 cloth; $24.99 e-book. Megan E. Murton’s Chaucer’s Prayers presents an exacting critique of one of the last vestiges of that exceptionalism that, until recently, detached Chaucer from his historical context and contemporary English writing: the view of him as a fundamentally secular poet. In redressing the presentist bias behind a secular Chaucer, Murton makes a salient, and in some respects unconventional, case for Chaucer as a religious—specifically devotional—poet. She powerfully demonstrates how pivotal acts of prayer are to Chaucer’s literary corpus, from the early dream visions and the freestanding Marian An ABC to the Virgin, through the mid-career Troilus and Criseyde (which incorporates prayer perhaps most profoundly and problematically), to the Canterbury Tales, considering the tales of the Prioress, Second Nun, Man of Law, Knight, and Franklin, and especially Chaucer’s Retraction, in relation to the discourse of prayer. Drawing on studies of narrative voice and performance theory as applied to Chaucer studies by scholars such as David Lawton, A. C. Spearing, and William Quinn, and also incorporating work on affective devotion by historians of religion, Murton conceptualizes prayer as an intrinsically participatory and communal “script” that invites the reader to step into the subject position articulated by the prayer, thereby transforming (or, as she suggests, “re-writing”) the self in relation to the divine order. This is a salient, insightful argument, one that positions Chaucer’s creative interests at the juncture of subjectivity and ritual convention. Prior scholarship that has viewed Chaucer as seriously engaging religious themes has generally emphasized either the poet’s relation to Lollardy or his supposed doctrinal agenda as a poet in the Augustinian mode. This latter (exegetical) view often encouraged, in its extremity, an overcorrection that tended to sever Chaucer entirely from a pious aesthetic by emphasizing a skeptical, relativistic worldview. In contrast to both of these scholarly perspectives, Murton’s Chaucer is decidedly a Christian humanist, orthodox yet subtly nonconformist in his literary expressions of piety. By drawing readers into acts of prayer in ways that are exploratory rather than prescriptive, Murton contends, Chaucer invites a collaboration with readers in a creative domain of sacred experience—an experimental space, as it were, in which ultimate answers are not stipulated or foreclosed. In this against-the-grain reading, the exceptional rhetorical mode of prayer sidesteps the conventional [End Page 335] medieval subordination of poetic expression to religious dogma, empowering devotional means to serve literary ends. Murton’s study begins, in Chapter 1, with the most culturally legible instances of devotion in Chaucer’s corpus: the Marian prayers that feature in the prologues of the Second Nun and Prioress and constitute the oftenmarginalized An ABC to the Virgin. This chapter’s sparkling close readings discover, in the formal properties of language, meter, and diction as well as intertextual comparison with French and Italian precedents, the designs that these Marian prayers have on readers as they execute “the universal work of forming a self who is able to receive grace” (41). The abecedarian lyric, Murton illustrates, constructs a devotional subjectivity in which readers may participate by means of a “circular dynamics” (37) of supplication and reception. The transformative and participatory nature of this Marian prayer is echoed in those of Chaucer’s two female religious pilgrims, whose prologues Murton reads in relation to their tales but in detachment from the Canterbury framework (as do those manuscripts that anthologized these tales separately from the larger story collection). From this angle, much-debated critical issues, such as anti-Semitism and narrative irony in the case of The Prioress’s Tale, are neutralized: the prayerful prologues, rather than being projections of dramatic personae, become scripts for readers to perform as devotional subjects. Both engage in the “project of forming a reader” for their respective tales (48), which cohere around themes of physical embodiment (The Second Nun’s Tale) and linguistic inexpressibility (The Prioress’s Tale). Nestled between analyses of Chaucer...