The Norton Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales ed. by David Lawton (review)

Abstract

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...