Social Chaucer (review)

Abstract

252 Short notices to expect from his multi-faceted pen. A foretaste of his projected analysis of the city's development is provided in Paper I, a summary of his 1983 College de France lectures. Let us hope that Mango will be able to bring that major and much needed work to fruition. Elizabeth Jeffreys Department of M o d e m Greek University of Sydney Pagliaro, Teresa, ed., The La Trobe Library Journal, Vol. 13, Nos. 51 & 52, Melbourne, The friends of the State Library of Victoria, 1993; paper; pp. 92; R.R.P. AUS$18 + $2.00 postage [available from Brian Hubber, State Library of Victoria]. This is a special issue of the La Trobe Library Journal devoted to the medieval manuscripts of the State Library of Victoria. It contains the following articles: Brian Hubber, ' "Of the numerous opportunities": the origins of the collection of medieval manuscripts at the State Library of Victoria'; Margaret M . Manion, "The Codex Sancti Paschalis"; Judith Oliver, 'Devotional images and pious practices in a psalter from Liege'; Michael Michael and Nigel Morgan, "The Sarum breviary in the BaUlieu and Bodleian libraries'; Joan Naugbton, "Tbe Poissy antiphonary in its royal monastic milieu'; John Stinson, "Tbe Poissy antiphonal: a major source of late medieval chant'; Hilary Maddocks, ' "Me thowhte as I slepte that I was a pilgrime":textand iUustration in DeguilleviUe's Pilgrimages in the State Library of Victoria'; Cecilia O'Brien, 'Lorenzo's book: a medicean manuscript of the Augustan History'; and Vera Vines, ' "The daily round, the common task": three books of hours in the State Library of Victoria'. John H. Pryor Departmentof History University of Sydney Strohm, Paul, Social Chaucer, Cambridge, Mass., and London, Harvard University Press, 1994; rpt; paper; pp. xiii, 236; R.R.P. US$15.95. Not only did the old U S S R and its 'evil emphe' fall apart in 1989, but so did many of our prevailing notions about Cold War ideology, stability in history, and coherence in language. Epistemologically, that year is even more of a watershed than 1968, to which we date much that is post-modem, post-structural, and deconstructionist. Hence a book which is reprinted five Short notices 253 years on, and whose own notes report that a text dated 1988 is 'too recent proper consideration' already looks at us across a great divide. Perhaps this is more true for Strohm's study of Chaucer than for many other studies of medieval literature because this book based its fundamental premises on a new sense of history and even, almost historiography. It revised standard views of hierarchy, feudalism, and social mobility in the thirteenth and foutreenth centuries to accommodate a new sense of Chaucer as part of an ambiguously and precariously emergent chcle of intellectuahzed bourgeois men (hardly w o m e n at this time), so that the 'polyvocality' of poems such as The Canterbury Tales and The Parlement of Fowls are as much attempts to formulate a discursive system in which the poet and his audience could feel familiar as to entertain and teach in traditional rhetorical ways. In some ways, then, looking back at what was written in the late 1980s seems to reveal a naive view of the Chaucerian social world, partly because we have learned to see how superficially ideologies and political myths sit on peoples and partly because, in the cynical backlash against the 'velvet revolution's' own facile optimism we have learned how deeply embedded are the mentalities of nationalism and religious bigotry. In other ways, it is clear that Strohm was already thinking along these lines, that his Chaucer is self-consciously aware of the processes of time and of civUization, and that the poetry is therefore more subtle, more double-edged, and elusive than really appreciated in the last century and a half of criticism. W h U e this is not a book for undergraduate students making then first forays into uncharted Middle English territory, it can certainly be recommended to anyone setting out to teach Chaucer to these children of tbe post-1989 world and, eventually, to graduate students who can grasp its subdeties and recontextuahze ittocurrent circumstances. It is always hard to...