The Canterbury Tales Handbook by Elizabeth Scala (review)

In placing the Miller's fabliau directly after the Knight's philosophical romance (and by design, not by accident) Chaucer issues a challenge to the open-mindedness of his readers, then as now. What is one to make of the juxtaposition of the refinements of love on the one hand and coarseness and squeamishness on the other? One is bound to admire (even if grudgingly) the resourcefulness of Chaucer's use of obscene language in The Miller's Tale. Words such as swyven are used not expletively but with the full force of their obscene meaning, and even a euphemism such as queynte is attracted towards its obscene equivalent. The Knight and the Miller do not inhabit discrete universes, but live side by side, often uncomfortably, in the same world. Courtesy and consideration for others are moral choices that not everyone is willing to make. The Miller's voice ought not to be stifled or censored even at the cost of some embarrassment on the reader's part. Allas, what is this wondre maladie? For hote of cold, for cold of hote, I dye.1 1Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde, I.419–20 in Benson, ed., The Riverside Chaucer. References throughout, given parenthetically in the text, are to this edition. Abbreviated titles are as follows: BD = Book of the Duchess; CkT = The Cook's Tale; FranT = The Franklin's Tale; GP = General Prologue; KnT = The Knight's Tale; MancT = The Manciple's Tale; MerT = The Merchant's Tale; MilProl. = The Miller's Prologue; MilT = The Miller's Tale; NPT = The Nun's Priest's Tale; ParsT = The Parson's Tale; RvT = The Reeve's Tale; SumT = The Summoner's Tale; TC = Troilus and Criseyde; WBProl. = The Wife of Bath Prologue. For other works referenced their titles are abbreviated as follows and the references are given in the notes: FQ = The Faerie Queene; PPl = Piers Plowman; SGGK = Sir Gawain and the Green Knight; ST = Summa theologiae.

This chapter provides descriptive information about people, places, things, and concepts in Chaucer's works and Chaucer's influence on generations of writers after him, and also an overview of topics of particular significance to Chaucer scholarship. It contains entries that start with the letter “C”, and the subsequent chapters of this book are alphabetized accordingly. This book thus provides a comprehensive overview of the life, times, works, sources/analogues, and influence of Geoffrey Chaucer for a new millennium of general readers, students, and scholars. The entries contain the headword, the name and institutional affiliation of the author of the entry, the body of the entry, often a “see also” section with cross-references to related entries in the encyclopedia, and finally in most cases a list of references, with complete bibliography, that are mentioned as in-text citations in the entry.

Introduction

Reviewed by: Chaucer's "Squire's Tale," "Franklin's Tale," and "Physician's Tale": An Annotated Bibliography 1900–2005 ed. by Kenneth Bleeth Daniel J. Ransom Kenneth Bleeth, ed. Chaucer's "Squire's Tale," "Franklin's Tale," and "Physician's Tale": An Annotated Bibliography 1900–2005. Chaucer Bibliographies 9. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Pp. xxvi, 570. $133.00. Reviewers of Variorum Chaucer fascicles have observed that readers know what to expect in each of those volumes. The same is true for the Chaucer Bibliographies series, the ninth volume of which has now appeared. Having reviewed Monica McAlpine's bibliography of The Knight's Tale (SAC 15 [1993]: 229–32), I certainly had a fair idea of what I would find upon opening Kenneth Bleeth's excellent addition to the Toronto series. Indeed, most Chaucer scholars have the same anticipations, but since they also have expectations of book reviews, let me begin by providing the requisite thumbnail sketch of the contents of Professor Bleeth's volume. Because the book treats more than one tale, and because two of the tales, those of the Squire and the Franklin, constitute a single "fragment" or "group," Bleeth deploys the following system of organization in the first fifth of his book. He puts the introductions to The Squire's Tale and The Franklin's Tale in sequence (3–19 and 20–33, respectively). Each of these is divided into topics. For The Squire's Tale, he includes the categories of "Source Study," "Genre," "Teller and Tale," "Orientalism and the Exotic," "Magic, Science, and Technology," and "The Squire's Tale, Part 2." Last in this sequence is "The Tale as Fragment," itself subdivided into two sets of bullet points. The first set surveys opinions on the story's incompleteness as expressed before 1990. The second set summarizes responses to these earlier assessments, positive and negative. Following this section is the introduction to The Franklin's Tale, which identifies the following topics: "Sources and Analogues," "The Franklin's [End Page 338] Tale and the Marriage Debate," "The Teller and the Tale," "Characterization," "Astrology and Magic," "Setting," and "Six Passages" (each passage a focus of commentary). In all of these sections, Bleeth paints with a broad brush and supplies cross-references (bold-face entry numbers) where summaries of the individual treatments are to be found. Then follows a joint section on "Editions and Modernizations" (34–59), which treats the two tales as a unit. Thereafter, Bleeth lists and summarizes publications focused on "Sources, Analogues, and the Posterity of The Squire's Tale" (60–82). Next appears "The Franklin's Tale: Sources, Analogues, and Later Influence" (83–111). In each of these last three sections, as in the general surveys of criticism that follow, items are arranged chronologically; items published in the same year are presented in alphabetical sequence. Given the careful subdivisions of most of the sections mentioned above, it is surprising that the section on "Editions and Modernizations" has no subdivisions at all; mere chronology and alphabetization are its principles of arrangement. The editor has, I think, missed an opportunity. It would be easy to introduce categories. One could simplify the model employed in Eleanor Hammond's Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual (1908). By separating the thirty-six comprehensive editions (including editions both of the complete works and of the Canterbury Tales alone) and the eighteen more-or-less complete translations (of the works or of CT), one could more readily see the relative prominence of The Squire's Tale and The Franklin's Tale over the last hundred or so years. There are twenty-six editions of selected works; SqT and FranT appear in six of them, SqT without FranT in seven, and FranT without SqT in thirteen. Sifting further, one finds seven editions dedicated to SqT alone and eight to FranT alone. Among translations of selected works, there are four that have both SqT and FranT, seven with SqT but not FranT, and eighteen with FranT but not SqT. Furthermore, there are three freestanding translations of FranT (items 76, 94, and 119), and one (item 44, omit the erroneous "the" from the title as printed) that includes The Clerk's Tale but...

Publishers Acknowledgements. Editor's Acknowledgements. Editions and Abbreviations Used in the Text. 1. Introduction 2. H. MARSHALL LEICESTER, JR, Structure as Deconstruction: 'Chaucer and Estates Satire' in the 'General Prologue', or Reading Chaucer as a Prologue to the History of Disenchantment 3. MARK A. SHERMAN, The Politics of Discourse in Chaucer's 'Knight's Tale' 4. PEGGY KNAPP, Robyn the Miller's Thrifty Work 5. CAROLYN DINSHAW, The Law of Man and its 'Abhomynacions' 6. ARTHUR LINDLEY, 'Vanysshed Was This Daunce, He Nyste Where': Alisoun's Absence in the 'Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale' 7. ELAINE TUTTLE HANSEN, The Powers of Silence: the Case of the Clerk's Griselda 8. CAROLYN P. COLLETTE, Umberto Eco, Semiotics, and the 'Merchant's Tale' 9. JOHN STEPHENS & MARCELLA RYAN, Metafictional Strategies and the Theme of Sexual Power in the Wife of Bath's and Frankiln's Tales 10. LEE PATTERSON, The Subject of Confession: the Pardoner and the Rhetoric of Penance 11. ELIZABETH ROBERTSON, Aspects of Female Piety in the 'Prioress's Tale' 12. BRITTON J. HARWOOD, Signs and / as Origin: Chaucer's 'Nun's Priest's Tale' 13. PAUL STROHM, A Mixed Commonwealth of Style Further Reading. Index

Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales The General Prologue The Knight's Tale The Miller's Tale The Reeve's Tale The Cook's Tale The Man of Law's Tale The Wife of Bath's Tale The Friar's and Summoner's Tales The Clerk's Tale The Merchant's Tale The Squire's and Franklin's Tale The Physician's Tale The Pardoner's Tale The Shipman's Tale The Prioress's Tale Sir Thopas and Melibee The Monk's Tale The Nun's Priest's Tale The Second Nun's Tale The Canon Yeoman's Tale The Manciple's Tale The Parson's Tale Bibliography Index

Reviewed by: The Norton Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales ed. by David Lawton Peter Fields David Lawton, editor. The Norton Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales. Norton, 2020. 627 p. David Lawton's Norton edition of The Canterbury Tales is the ideal teaching choice for Chaucer. Once upon a time, I required my students to use the scholarly Riverside Chaucer whose explication was always the most masterful: e.g., tracking the Wife of Bath's Prologue line by line with Jerome's Against Jovinian (yes, to die for). Then my evolution took me to Kolve and Olson's Norton edition of Fifteen Tales and General Prologue. However, after perusing Lawton's edition (distilled from his 2019 complete Norton Chaucer), I am ready to evolve again if only so I can include as much of "The Parson's Tale" as possible. Of course, Kolve and Olson were way ahead of me. They added more of "The Parson's Tale" along with "The Man of Law's Tale" to give us the Norton Seventeen Tales (2018). However, Lawton's subtle (but powerful) point of view has converted me to his conviction: if we are reading stories with Chaucer, then we need not less but more of Chaucer to understand his interest in these texts. Everything in the introduction serves dual purposes: not only [End Page 233] an overview of Chaucer's life and times but also an implicit overview of The Canterbury Tales, offering themes to which Lawton will return in the prefaces (and footnotes) for the 10 parts of the Tales. The genius of these recurring themes is to help us appreciate the value of lesserknown tales and make a case for them. Who are the big winners in these sweepstakes? For me, I was especially taken with "The Second Nun's Prologue and Tale," which incorporates (not unlike "The Prioress's Prologue and Tale") Marianism from St. Bernard and Dante's Paradiso, and adds to it explication of St. Cecilia's name. The Second Nun manages to resist the blood libel of the Prioress but still deliver on a devotional spirituality jarringly steeped in violence (something Lawton also notes in "The Man of Law's Tale"). Here we find a religious eroticism just a little longer (but more adult) than the Prioress's fetish for infantile simplicity at a mother's breast. The fetish for the Second Nun centers on a jealous angel's possession of Cecilia's body. Male converts to her cult enter a kind of mystic multiple marriage, tantalized by an immersive sensorium of sights, sounds, and scents unavailable to the non-believer. Another big winner is "The Monk's Tale," not only the brief sections on Samson, Hercules, Nebuchadnezzar, and Belshazzar, but also the longer account of Zenobia, which could have been a rollercoaster of a tale all by itself. The sections on Nero, Julius Caesar, and Croesus are thumbnail portraits of graphic violence. If students have patiently absorbed "The General Prologue" and "The Knight's Tale," the monk's compendium of tragic celebrity will feel like a gothic romp. These thumbnail portraits in violent shock-and-awe complement, and set off, the more philosophical inclinations of "The Wife of Bath" and "The Nun's Priest." The sense of guilty excess in all the stories leads nicely to perhaps the biggest winner in Lawton, "The Parson's Tale": "The tension between play and penance, which runs though The Canterbury Tales from the opening of the General Prologue, here reaches the point of climatic rupture" (500). The Parson's penitential discourse is delightfully spiced with vivid strokes of grotesque description like the "superfluitee of clothing" which the wearer unwittingly soils, "trailing in the dong and in the mire" (lines 20-21; p. 524) versus the "horrible disordinate scantnesse of clothing" (32: p. 524), best illustrated by overly-revealing male hose that "shewen the shap and the boce of hir [their] horrible swollen membres" (36-7; p. 524). Lawton keeps pace, [End Page 234] confirming we heard the Pardoner correctly. To be sure, Lawton is faithful to Chaucer's sources, the most frequent of which seems to be the Roman de la rose. Lawton, in fact, closely monitors Chaucer's reading...

����� Why does the Wife of Bath tell a romance? This question is virtually a critical clichA©, but for good reason: General Prologue, the pilgrims' prologues, and the narratives preceding her tale establish the expectation that she will tell a tale suited to her social class and vocation. As even the most casual reader of The Canterbury Tales cannot help but observe, the speaker of a tale generally chooses a genre that reflects his or her character: in the majority of the tales, the speaker's economic class or vocation relates at least peripherally to the genre of his/her tale.1 The Wife of Bath, however, disrupts this pattern: although her Prologue establishes her as a bawdy and raucous figure, on a similar economic level of such other fabliau-tellers as the Miller and the Merchant, she breaks from her socioeconomic position to tell a romance rather than a fabliau. Furthermore, Alison's Prologue and are virtually surrounded by fabliaux.2 They must follow the texts of the introductory Fragment I, which contains the Miller's and the Reeve's fabliaux, and they immediately precede the fabliaux of Fragment III, Friar's Tale and Summoner's Tale.3 Given her social position, her bawdy temperament, and her place in the overarching narrative of The Canterbury Tales, it seems much more likely that Alison would tell a fabliau than a romance.4

Acknowledgements Introduction: Chaucer and the problem of normativity 1. Naturalism and its discontents in the Miller's Tale 2. Normative longing in the Knight's Tale 3. Agency and dialectic in the Consolation of Philosophy 4. Sadomasochism and utopia in the Roman de la Rose 5. Suffering love in the Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale 6. Love's promise: the Clerk's Tale and the scandal of the unconditional Notes Bibliography Index.

Previous articleNext article No AccessEast Meets West in Chaucer's Squire's and Franklin's TalesKathryn L. LynchKathryn L. Lynch Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Speculum Volume 70, Number 3Jul., 1995 The journal of the Medieval Academy of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.2307/2865269 Citations: 10Citations are reported from Crossref Copyright 1995 Medieval AcademyPDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Robert J. Meyer-Lee Literary Value and Social Identity in the Canterbury Tales, 4 (Oct 2019).https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108757621Shawn Normandin Iterability, Anthropocentrism, and the Franklin’s Tale, (Jun 2018): 123–149.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90457-3_4 Margaret Kim Polyandry and The Travels of Marco Polo: Beyond the Ethnography of the Patriarchal Household, Feminist Studies in English Literature 20, no.33 (Dec 2012): 217–245.https://doi.org/10.15796/fsel.2012.20.3.008Lorraine Kochanske Stock Foiled by Fowl: The Squire’s Peregrine Falcon and the Franklin’s Dorigen, (Jan 2012): 85–100.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137040732_6Sara Deutch Schotland Avian Hybridity in “The Squire’s Tale”: Uses of Anthropomorphism, (Jan 2012): 115–130.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137040732_8Lesley Kordecki The Squire’s Tale: Romancing Animal Magic, (Jan 2011): 77–101.https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230337893_4John Ganim Cosmopolitanism and Medievalism, Exemplaria 22, no.11 (Jul 2013): 5–27.https://doi.org/10.1179/104125710X12670926011716 APOLLO’S CHARIOT AND THE CHRISTIAN SUBTEXT OF THE FRANKLIN’S TALE, Journal of Medieval Religious Cultures 36, no.11 (Jan 2010): 47–67.https://doi.org/10.5325/jmedirelicult.36.1.0047Keiko Hamaguchi Transgressing the Borderline of Gender: Zenobia in the Monk's Tale, The Chaucer Review 40, no.22 (Jan 2005): 183–205.https://doi.org/10.2307/25094317Patricia Clare Ingham Contrapuntal Histories, (Jan 2003): 47–70.https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980236_3

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER oretical horizons and sufficient patience,Ratio andInvention will prove an exciting intellectual experience. R. W HANNING Columbia University SUSANNA GREER FEIN, DAVID RAYBIN, and PETER C. BRAEGER, eds. Rebels and Rivals: The Contestive Spirit in The Canterbury Tales. Studies in Medieval Culture, vol. 29. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 1991. Pp. xxiv, 269. $32.95 cloth, $14.95 paper. This volume traces its history from a six-week Institute on Chaucer's Canterbury Tales held at the University ofConnecticut in the summer of 1987. The purpose of the institute, which was sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities, was in part to reenergize Chaucer teachers faced with a real or threatened decline in institutional support for medieval studies. "Chaucer's Institute," as it came to be called after the conference coordinating office printed the badges that way, sounds like an impressive success in C. David Benson's account of it, "A Memoir of Chaucer's In­ stitute." The essays in the volume suggest the nature ofthat success, which is based not on unanimity of outlook or adherence to a particular the­ oretical school (or even commitment to consider theory important to Chaucer studies) but on a genial pluralism and a pleasure in writing about The Canterbury Tales. The disclosure of new knowledge is quite varied among these essays, but all are written in accessible language, are focused closely on the texts of the Tales, and take a respectful attitude toward the poet's intentions, in keeping with the goals of the institute (pp. xx-xxi). The volume is carefully edited, with a largely appreciative foreword by Derek Pearsall, an explanatory preface by the editors, and a common reference list and index for all the essays. These features make the volume easy to use and suit it for what I take to be one of its major purposes: to stimulate the thinking of teachers ofChaucer. The thematic thread that runs through the collection is that of strife among the pilgrims, a focus broad enough to accommodate many interests and approaches. Some contributors write about rivalries between Chaucer's characters, as does Bruce Kent Cowgill in his attempt to show the usually 124 REVIEWS undifferentiated Aleyn andJohn in The Reeve's Tale to be in fact rivals in their unfolding narrative. Some take the pilgrims' conflicts as conflicts between ideas, as do Frederick B.Jonassen'salignmentofthe Host with the values and perspectives of the body and the Parson with those of the spirit (and the Pardoner a naysayer to both), and Susan K. Hagen's assertion that the Wife of Bath's call to reject male authority is doomed by critics who accept the priority of logic over rhetoric (a position I find too dismissive of Alison's considerable gifts for a "male" style of hermeneutics and debate). Jay Ruud places ideas in contest, discussing the rich patina of scriptural allusion in The Summoner's Tale and arguing that the focus ofthe tale is on the spirit (and its perversion by FriarJohn in the tale) rather than on anger. Two essays are good examples ofclose formalist readings, and both reveal much about their subjects. William F Woods explores The Knight's Tale as an elaborate pattern of compositional effects. His "Up and Down, To and Fro" is about the way narrative elements in themselves quite inconsequen­ tialcan be seen to add upto a vision ofnaturalcycles, social hierarchies, and spiritual aspirations. Charles Owen provides a meticulous examination of the metrical, figural, andsyntacticpatterns in thefalcon'scomplaint in The Squire's Tale, and the emotional effects they produce, demonstrating the subtle complexity of a passage often among those "forgotten" in critical accounts of Chaucer's style and vision. Susanna Greer Fein is also a very close reader. She draws together the Reeve's cynical lines on aging in his prologue with the narrative trajectory of his tale and his competition with the Miller through the medieval trope of the Wheel oflife. The trope and the attitudes that explain its ubiquity are persuasively discussed and cleverly linked to the mill wheel that superin­ tends the Reeve's story. Her argument locates Chaucer subtly but firmly within a familiar iconic...

To be content with ‘enough’ was one kind of virtue; to be liberal with surplus was another. Chaucer found liberality applauded in Boccaccio’s writings. But the classical concept of cautious liberality transmitted through Cicero had undergone a strained assimilation into Christian ‘largenesse’ and charity, and as Chaucer shows through figures such as Dido and Dorigen, its gendering was also complicated. It is argued that the Wife of Bath’s Prologue offers a beguiling model of generosity through female sexuality, and that her Tale, in which women cannot hold back the answers to the knight’s predicament, further explores generosity as a gendered virtue of unlocked speech.

The chapter examines Chaucer’s fascination with the ethical antithesis between credulity and visionary prudence, together with complex attendant genderings. In the Miller’s Tale, the human power to match the sweep of providence is queried through the problem of escaping from unpredictable floods. The tale mischievously mocks a peasant’s credulousness, his wife’s instinctuality, and a student’s pretension to prudential foresight. In the Merchant’s Tale credulity, arrogant imperviousness, and lust are more tartly explored as impediments to human vision. That the scales eventually drop from January’s physical sight correlates wittily with a Stoic idea that the cataract of ethical ignorance has to be removed to acquire mental vision. But it is in the Wife of Bath’s Tale that male vision is more productively improved, when an old woman becomes an instrument of moral enlightenment, bidding her knight-husband to ‘cast up the curtain’ and see ‘how it is’.

Locating Authorial Ethics:

Reviewed by: The Tolkien Fan’s Medieval Reader Jane Chance The Tolkien Fan’s Medieval Reader, edited by Turgon (David E. Smith) . Cold Spring Harbor, NY: Cold Spring Press, 2004. 400 pp. $14.95 (trade paperback) ISBN 1593600119. Foreword by Verlyn Flieger . Finally, someone has had the excellent sense to put together a collection of the medieval literary works most important to J. R. R. Tolkien, both as scholar and as fantasy writer, written in the translations of his day that he most likely knew. The Tolkien Fan's Medieval Reader was astutely collected by Turgon (David E. Smith) of TheOneRing.net, responsible for book reviews and interviews in the Green Books section and a co-author of The People's Guide to J. R. R. Tolkien (2003). This useful anthology presents mainly prose selections from Old English, Middle English, [End Page 271] Old Norse, Celtic (Welsh), and Finnish works in a variety of medieval genres—epic, lyric, chronicle, romance, dream vision, fabliau, beast fable, Breton lay, and saga. These works are a must-read for the educated reader of Tolkien, the university student, and the scholar who wants quick access to what Tolkien taught and spent his career researching. To have them—all out of print—available in one convenient paperback is a great boon. Although I do not have the space here to analyze why and how the selections in each section are appropriate to the study and understanding of Tolkien, I can single out the Old and Middle English as especially significant, and suggestive of Turgon's approach in the other sections. The Old English section begins with the all-important Beowulf, about which Tolkien wrote a seminal and groundbreaking essay that changed the study of Anglo-Saxon and coincided with Tolkien's writing of The Hobbit. As epic it surely helped charge Tolkien's own version in The Lord of the Rings. The translation is by John Clark Hall (1911), as is the unfinished Finnsburg Fragment that follows; Tolkien wrote a foreword to Clark Hall's translation that praises it for being literally accurate rather than figurative, and, therefore, more faithful to the original Anglo-Saxon and the intent of the poet. "The Wanderer" (whose "ubi sunt" passage is paraphrased by Aragorn when the fellowship reaches Anglo-Saxon-shaped Rohan) and "The Seafarer" (a figure that repeatedly appears in the Silmarillion mythology in characters such as Aelfwine and Earendil) have been translated by Nora Kershaw (1922)—the Old Norse scholar Nora K. Chadwick, who also translated the Saga of King Heidrek the Wise later in the volume. "The Battle of Maldon" appears, too, for which Tolkien wrote the verse-drama sequel, "The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son" (1953). Middle English begins, equally appropriately for Tolkien, with Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, translated by Jessie L. Weston (1898). Weston's book on the origins of the Grail Quest, From Ritual to Romance (1920), was indebted to the ideas of Sir James Frazer and The Golden Bough. The romance of Sir Gawain Tolkien himself coedited, with E.V. Gordon, in a critical edition (1925) that remains standard today. Tolkien also translated both it and the dream vision poem Pearl (1975) (here, translated by Charles G. Osgood, Jr.) and delivered a lecture about the former in Scotland (1953). Of the Chaucerian Canterbury Tales selected, the Reeve's Tale isimportant because of Tolkien's influential philological essay on the northern and southern dialects of Middle English used by the two country-bumpkin clerks and the wily miller (1934), which most likely helped shape Tolkien's treatment of rustics in his own fairy-tales.So also the Breton lay Franklin's Tale, with its emphasis on courtly love in marriage, influenced Tolkien's "Lay of Aotrou and Itroun" (1945). [End Page 272] In the remainder of the volume, two Old Norse sagas appear, from Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda, translated by famed Beowulf scholar Arthur Gilchrist Brodeur (1916), and a "saga of ancient times" with a riddle-match reminiscent of Bilbo's with Gollum, again, by Chadwick (1921); five tales from the Welsh Mabinogion, translated by Lady Charlotte Guest (1849);and the extremely important Finnish tale of the...