Chaucer’s Pilgrims: An Historical Guide to the Pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales ed. by Laura C. Lambdin and Robert T. Lambdin

Abstract

REVIEWS their own routes through the hermeneutic forest that surrounds classical poetry, it is often the figures of women who reveal the extent to which these poets have diverged from their models. When Chaucer refuses the obvious misogyny of earlier versions of the tale by creating a Criseyde who is both engaging and enigmatic, it seems to me he is telling us some­ thing about his own role as a translator and poet in an emerging Middle English literary tradition. Alas, Kellogg is not interested in discussing such matters as creative imitation and allusion in any depth. She returns repeatedly to the simplistic notion that earlier sources provide a kind of absolute truth about a particular narrative or character. Such an approach cannot account adequately for the transformations that Chaucer wrought upon the Filostrato. If Criseyde's only attribute is her inconstancy, then she becomes a stick figure hardly worthy of scrutiny. Surely her staying power over the centuries has proven otherwise. DISA GAMBERA Carleton College LAURA C. LAMBDIN and ROBERT T. LAMBDIN, eds. Chaucer's Pilgrims: An Historical Guide to the Pilgrims in The Canterbury Tales. Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press, 1996. Pp. xiv, 398. $79.50. In this long and ambitiously comprehensive set ofchapters on Chaucer's pilgrim company (thirty-two chapters: one per personage), the editors have gathered essays from an equal number ofcontributors (thirty-two), themselves included. They proceed under the portmanteau premise that a reading of The Canterbury Tales will profit from a far more detailed knowledge of occupational data concerning these travelers than a late twentieth-century reader is likely to discover from the allusive infor­ mation provided by the poet in his own General Prologue pilgrim por­ traits. Despite Muriel Bowden's Commentary (1948) and Jill Mann's Estates Satire (1973), the editors assert a fundamental difficulty in lo­ cating information concerning the vocations ofthe pilgrims. This book, they claim, will repair a "critical fissure" and fill a "gap" of "some six hundred years" duration by providing these thirty-two essays, each of which proposes to supply "an in-depth entry describing that pilgrim's specific function in fourteenth-century England" (p. xi). 271 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Not surprisingly, the essays-aimed at an audience that includes "all teachers and students of Chaucer, from high school to graduate school" (p. xi), and authored by a company of contributors ranging from sea­ soned senior scholars to graduate students specializing in technical writing-are uneven in quality. At best, one still must question the om­ nium gatherum attempt to load into one volume a mass ofvocational data that, in nearly every instance, is already easily available elsewhere, often no further away than the notes, commentaries, and bibliographies in­ cluded in the standard Benson edition of The Canterbury Tales.1 There is something problematical, too, about the editorial decision to standard­ ize the format ofeach essay, so that in thirty-two relentlessly similar ex­ cursions, readers find a detailed description oftypical daily occupational routine (which may, or may not, have subsequent relevance to the po­ etry of Chaucer) followed by attempts to revisit the overmapped criti­ cal categories ofteller-tale connections and General Prologue links to the Tales that follow. However salutary (or dubious) one judges the governing premise and the individual entries of this reader's guide, one must unfortunately note that the Lambdins' collection suffers from an array of editorial deficits-some quite serious-that impair the volume's overall credi­ bility and usefulness. These include errors of fact; errors of translation; persistent problems ofusage and tone; and bibliographies frequently so outdated, in the main, or so laden with sources ofquestionable weight, that the foundational assertions derived therefrom are highly problem­ atic. It is not a pleasant, but a necessary, duty to detail some of these typical shortfalls. In a quoted verse from "The descryuyng of mannes membres" (pp. 30-31), for example, where the poet is metaphorizing "shoulder," "backbone," "fingers," and "arms," the serial cognate "hondes" is im­ probably translated as "hounds." Chaucer's "mayster-hunte," who "With a gret horn blew thre mot" (BD 375-76), becomes a senseless huntmas­ ter who "With a great horn blew three...