De Miseria Condicionis Humane ed. by Robert E. Lewis

Abstract

REVIEWS forth. The obvious difficulty is in deciding which correspondences, though real, lie beyond the probability of Chaucer's intent. Chaucer, indeed, often lets little details carry immense significance for character. Haskell's volume, for analyzing (but not exhausting) one under-investigated source of these, is worth the attention of Chaucer scholars. THOMAS R. LISZKA The University of Illinois at Chicago Circle ROBERT E. LEWIS, ed., De Miseria Condicionis Humane. By Lotario dei Segni (Pope Innocent Ill). The Chaucer Library. Athens: Universi­ ty of Georgia Press, 1978. Pp. xiv, 303. $25. It stands to reason that Chaucer could have read the treatise De Miseria Humane Conditionis, also called De Contemptu Mundi. The work was well-known and extremely popular; beyond that, the G version of the Prologue to The Legend ofGood Women claims that the poet translated "of the Wreched Engendrynge of Mankynde, As man may in pope Innocent yfynde" (G, 414-15). Ifin fact he did make such a translation (it has never been found), Chaucer never later in his poetry used materials from De Miseria in the same extensive way that he did those from The Consolation ofPhilosophy after he translated it. In the case of De Miseria, moreover, all passages of Chaucer's poetry that exhibit any influence from the work can have derived their materials from sources other than De Miseria itself-all, that is, except for perhaps a few passages in The Man of Law's Prologue and Tale. The Chaucer Library was created in order to answer questions about the relationship of the poet to his sources. Inspired by Karl Young's researches at the time of his death, formally constituted in 1946 under the chairmanship of]. Burke Severs, the Chaucer Library's work has been carried forward by Robert A. Pratt, who just recently retired as its Chairman, to be succeeded by Robert E. Lewis, who is also the editor of the first volume of the Chaucer Library series. But there are two earlier volumes that can be related to the series. First, there is Severs' own Literary Relationships ofChaucer's Clerkes Tale (New Haven and London, 1942), which attempted to establish the manuscript tradition of the Griselda story from which Chaucer worked; the volume was initially praised by the reviewers, including Germaine Dempster, who within a 167 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER short time changed her mind, however, and demonstrated that Severs chose the wrong manuscript family on which to base his text(see MP, 40 [1943], 285-88; 41 [1943], 6-16). More recently, Paul M. Clogan published his Medieval Achilleid of Statius (Leiden, 1968), "For 'The Chaucer Library,' "as his dedication page stipulates; Clogan presents his text as that found in a "typical"Liber Catonianus. Although it makes sense that Chaucer could have read the Achilleid in his Cato book, still it is regrettable that theAchilleidwas not published together with the other "typical"contents of that school text. Professor Lewis' volume arrives a decade later, with apparatus as complex and extensive as Severs', yet with only a "typical" text, in the manner of Clogan's. The volume is as handsome and impressive-looking as it is problematic. Now, the ideal for the series was set forth from the beginning: to produce texts of those works Chaucer knew and used in the forms in which he knew and used them. In the Foreword to Lewis' edition Professor· Pratt recalls this ideal: "Glosses and commentaries which accompanied the texts will be presented; even scribal perversions which may explain Chaucer's text will be recorded. . . . Such a faithful reproduction ofChaucer's books as he knew them is ofcourse essential if we are accurately and adequately to understand their influence upon him"(p. ix). In an agreement for publication ratified in December 1970 by the Chaucer Library Committee, the Executive Committee of the Chaucer Group of the MLA, the Executive Council of the MLA, the Executive Committee of the Mediaeval Academy, and the University of Georgia Press, the ideal is stipulated anew: "The Chaucer Library is a series of the classical and medieval works that Chaucer knew, so edited from the medieval manuscripts as to provide texts most nearly like those that Chaucer...