MARK MILLER, Philosophical Chaucer: Love, Sex, and Agency in the Canterbury Tales. Pp. x + 289 (Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature 55). Cambridge, New York, Oakleigh: Cambridge University Press, 2005. 45.00 (ISBN 0 521 84236 0).

Abstract

A READER might be forgiven for thinking that a book on ‘philosophical Chaucer’ might focus on the philosophical writings familiar to Chaucer himself – the commentary traditions centred on Boethius, the insolubilia associated with the author as a result of the dedication of Troilus and Criseyde to the logician Ralph Strode, and so on. Mark Miller's ‘philosophical Chaucer’ is of a different species, however: instead of using fourteenth-century philosophy to historicize medieval poetry, Miller seeks to use both classical philosophy (Plato, Aristotle) and modern philosophy (Frankfurt, Nagel, Nietzsche, Williams, Wittgenstein, Zizek) in order to produce a reading of Chaucer that generates ‘a substantive analysis of normativity’ (12). Miller is eager to reassure his readers that, in seeking to use Chaucer's writings to produce a critique of normativity as it appears in postmodern theory, he does not disavow the importance of ‘historicizing’ Chaucer in his medieval context. Miller acknowledges that his focus on normativity emerges from ‘a desire to address this blind spot in our intellectual culture’; he hastens to add, however, ‘I have strictly historicist reasons for doing so’ (21). Philosophical Chaucer thus takes its place among other recent monographs in medieval literary studies, such as Daniel Heller-Roazen's Fortune's Faces: The Roman de la Rose and the Poetics of Contingency, as a work that attempts to assume the theoretical mantle of postmodernism while remaining grounded in historicist readings of literature. In this attempt to navigate the Scylla of postmodern theory and the Charybdis of historicist practice, Miller partakes in a mode of critical writing that is peculiar to contemporary North American academia, as he himself signals in referring to ‘contemporary US academic culture’ (21) and, more boldly, assuming a fundamentally American audience for his book (30).