Rewriting Chaucer: Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400–1602 ed. by Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline

Abstract

REVIEWS Pratt’s study is valuable in providing a more accurate historical context for the controversial character, but this book is not, as its title claims, a definitive account of Chaucer and War. Denise N. Baker University of North Carolina–Greensboro Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline, eds. Rewriting Chaucer : Culture, Authority, and the Idea of the Authentic Text, 1400–1602. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1999. Pp. vii. 301. $26.00. Ostensibly, Thomas A. Prendergast and Barbara Kline’s Rewriting Chaucer collects eleven textual studies of some of the manuscripts and books that comprise the Chaucerian canon. This focus quickly opens onto a series of issues concerning authorial and scribal intention, editorial responsibility and skepticism, canonicity and closure. Embedded within the collection, then, are fundamental questions about our own processes of reading and writing. In answer, Rewriting Chaucer stands on the brink of paradox, proposing a Chaucer whose boundaries are lost yet can still be recovered, and a fifteenth- and sixteenth-century culture whose material and intellectual practices construct the Chaucerian canon by obscuring Chaucer’s intentions. The collection is organized in three sections. The first, ‘‘Origins and Authority,’’ opens with John M. Bowers’s examination of the beginning of The Canterbury Tales, The General Prologue’s pilgrims who do not tell tales. Bowers uses this topic to reveal both the unintentional—the way the Tales’s unfinished nature encourages later addition—and the intentional —Chaucer’s choice to turn away from the politically charged historical issues that these figures raise. Mı́c .eál F. Vaughan moves the discussion to the Tales’s accepted end, The Parson’s Tale and the Retractions . Collating the manuscript witnesses to these texts, Vaughan argues that the two constitute an independent unit soldered onto the unfinished Tales after Chaucer’s death. As Bowers does, Vaughan focuses his findings around intentionality, closure, and canoncity, arguing that ‘‘scribal inventions have come to stand for authorial intentions, and po585 ................. 8972$$ CH21 11-01-10 12:23:31 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER tential complications recede before a desire for a satisfactory conclusion to Chaucer’s final great work’’ (p. 47). Bowers and Vaughan thus open Rewriting Chaucer with a provocative, contentious, and iconoclastic spirit, one the subsequent sections continue . The second, ‘‘Dissemination and Interpretation,’’ presents a series of manuscript readings. Mary F. Godfrey reads The Prioress’s Tale as it appears in three manuscript anthologies, Harley 1704, 2251, 2382. For Godfrey, the anthology setting revises The Prioress’s Tale’s anti-Semitic thrust so that the violence imagined against the Jew is ‘‘inward-turning and self-reflective’’ (p. 109). Barbara Kline narrows this sense of revision in her study of MS Harley 7333, a manuscript produced by the Augustinian canons at Leicester Abbey; she concludes that the Leicester scribes were ‘‘not merely copiers of Chaucer’s tales, but interested readers who have left a record of their own interaction with the text, not just as glossators but as rewriters and, in some instances, censors’’ (p. 132). In turn, Edgar Laird presents Chaucer himself as an interested reader by placing the Treatise on the Astrolabe within the tradition of astronomical writings. Indeed, Kline’s notion of the scribe as interested reader sums up this section’s overall theme: that in late medieval culture the production of literary authority is a participatory event in which readers actively construct Chaucer’s authorship through the revision of his text. The following two essays offer evidence for such a readership in Scotland . Julia Boffey and A. S. G. Edwards explore the development of Bodleian MS Arch. Selden B.24 to suggest the scribal processes that transmitted Chaucerian material north while maintaining his English linguistic qualities. Carolyn Ives and David Parkinson read in the Bannatyne manuscript a mechanism of appropriation and undercutting through which Chaucer’s masculinity is intertwined with his Englishness , his misogyny with Scottish gender politics. Working from fairly different methodological approaches, then, the two essays demonstrate how textual and ideological modes of literary production intersect with national identity. The section concludes with Beverly Kennedy’s examination of The Wife of Bath’s Prologue. Pulling together the book’s themes, Kennedy argues that Cambridge Dd.4...