The Canterbury Tales by Helen Cooper

Abstract

REVIEWS line ofthe book. Between the two statements, Eco creates a comedy which, like the many medieval and modern comic works on which it is modelled, never sacrifices the deconstruction of its own materials to a putatively modern or postmodern vantage of discoursing on the past. It treats that past and its own modernity with too much humorous irony for our cliches about them to survive. For all of Coletti's attention to the "humorous" in The Name ofthe Rose, I would have liked to see much more ofit informing her attention to the difference between medieval and modern elements in Eco's novel. JESSE M. GELLRICH Louisiana State University HELEN COOPER. The Canterbury Tales. Oxford Guides to Chaucer. Oxford and New York: Clarendon Press, Oxford University Press, 1989. Pp. xiv, 437. $49.95 This is an age of commentary and ofcommentary upon commentary. First there was the Companion to Chaucer Studies, edited by Beryl Rowland; then the more recent Cambridge Companion to Chaucer, edited by Piero Boitani andJill Mann; and now the Oxford Guides to Chaucer. The first volume of a projected three (the other two are to be Troilus, by Barry Windeatt, and the Shorter Poems, by A. J. Minnis) is marked by wit, learning, intelligence, and that rarest of critical virtues, good judgment. Cooper announces that her purpose is "to give an up-to-date summary of what is known about the Canterbury Tales, together with a critical reading ofeach tale" (p. 1). The tales as a whole, The GeneralPrologue, and then each individual tale are discussed under a number ofcategories: date, text, genre, sources and analogues, structure, themes, the tale in context, and style. These headings are skillfully employed to produce clarity and varying perspectives without undue repetition, and they place a commendable emphasis on the factual. The section on the "Text," for example, reminds us that Chaucer's poetry exists only in the uncertain medium ofnonauthorial manuscripts and that "it is fearfully easy to base an argument on a passage of doubtful authenticity, or on structural patterns adopted by editors on flimsy manuscript evidence" (p. 1). The generalbibliography as well as the criticism relevant to specific topics tends to be sparing and modern. 183 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Individual readers may regret omissions (such as Kittredge's Chaucer's Poetry from the general bibliography), yet the books and articles men­ tioned by Cooper are always good places to begin further reading. This comprehensive reference tool faithfully reports what has been discovered about The Canterbury Tales, but the writing is always lively and engaged. The author's own views emerge without silencing the opinion of others. Cooper constantly reminds us of the many intellectual and moral challengesposed by Chaucer, yet she neverforgets that he is alsogreat good fun. The volume is full of sharp, stimulating observations. Properly skep­ tical about the great number of works that Chaucer has been credited with knowing (p. 10), she elsewhere notes that the fanciful (to modern tastes) etymologies in the Prologue to The SecondNun's Tale are "further evidence for his interest in the theory as well as the practice of language" (p. 362). In recording that Saint Jerome is the source of many of the Wife of Bath's arguments and exempla, Cooper notes that "the saint would have wept at her mishandling of them" (p. 141); latershe observesthatalthoughJerome like other male authorities "suffers equally badly at the Wife's hands," it is "equally well deserved: he too is quite prepared to wrench Scripture to his own purposes" (p. 145). The Oxford Guide is primarily interested in The Canterbury Tales as literature. It emphasizesquestions ofsource,genre, structure, and style; in contrast to much contemporary criticism, it is not much concerned with psychological or social contexts. Cooper is particularly sensitive to genre and structure, the focus of her previous work on The Canterbury Tales, as in her revealing outline of the symmetry of The Knight's Tale in both the Hengwrt and Ellesmere manuscripts (p. 74). Suspicious of those who read Chaucer's tales as dramatic speeches or as Christian allegory, Cooper resists any approach, old or new, that too easily limits the possibilities offered by the poet...