The Reception of Chaucer's Shorter Poems, 1400–1450: Female Audiences, English Manuscripts, French Contexts by Kara A. Doyle

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Reception of Chaucer's Shorter Poems, 1400–1450: Female Audiences, English Manuscripts, French Contexts by Kara A. Doyle Sarah Wilma Watson Kara A. Doyle. The Reception of Chaucer's Shorter Poems, 1400–1450: Female Audiences, English Manuscripts, French Contexts. Chaucer Studies. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2021. Pp. 306. $99.00 cloth; $24.99 e-book. Kara A. Doyle's new book uncovers an exciting early chapter in the reception of Chaucer's poetry. Exploring six manuscript compilations dating to [End Page 397] between 1410 and 1450, Doyle demonstrates how early compilers placed Chaucer in a French literary context that encouraged readers to focus on Chaucer's female-voiced critique of fin'amors. Creators of fifteenth-century compilations developed Chaucer's reputation as "womanis frend" by positioning his poetry alongside French and English texts that highlight female perspective, agency, and voice. Through codicological interpretation and comparative literary analysis, Doyle reconstructs the intertextual reading experience of medieval audiences, showing how compilers and readers encountered Chaucer, Hoccleve, and Lydgate through the lens of French lyric sequences and dits and debats amoureux. This French literary context foregrounded for medieval readers a concept that Doyle terms "the female hermeneutic dilemma"—"when confronted with fin'amor gallantry, should women believe men's protestations of love and fidelity or treat them with skepticism?" (3). Tracing the development of this idea in Chaucer's poetry and in the works of his French and English contemporaries and successors, Doyle explores how medieval authors, compilers, and readers responded to bids for female agency and challenges to courtly and chivalric masculinity. Before turning to the six manuscript compilations that structure her book, Doyle devotes Chapter 1 to exploring the "female hermeneutic dilemma" featured in all six collections. Influenced by Ovid's Heroides; the Ovide moralisé; the dits amoureux of Guillaume de Machaut; and the French lyric sequences of Eustache Deschamps, Christine de Pizan, and John Gower, Chaucer developed a female-voiced critique of fin'amors that is portrayed especially prominently in Anelida and Arcite. Analyzing this poem, Doyle identifies five tropes that constitute the female hermeneutic dilemma: "female ventriloquism, exposing male fickleness, skepticism about male fin'amor rhetoric, demonstrating female fidelity, and warning the female audience" (21). Doyle argues that this critique of fin'amors runs through much of Chaucer's work prior to the Canterbury Tales and receives especially extended and sincere treatment in Anelida and Arcite, a text popular among Chaucer's early readers. With the female hermeneutic dilemma in mind, in Chapter 2, Doyle turns to Cambridge University Library, MS Gg.4.27 (c. 1410–25), the earliest known attempt to compile a complete works of Chaucer. Doyle observes that the compiler opens the collection with "French-inflected materials" to create a "French lyric backdrop" (13) for Chaucer's works, and closes the collection with John Lydgate's Temple of Glass, a text that offers "an unusually thoughtful retrospective on the female-voiced tropes [End Page 398] in Chaucer's work" (14). The compiler of Gg.4.27 thus "encourages readers to see Chaucer through the lens of late fourteenth-century French literature and sets audiences up to think of Chaucer as 'womanis frend'" (52). Next, in Chapter 3, Doyle analyzes Durham Cathedral Library, MS Cosin V.ii.13, an anthology dating to between 1425 and 1450 that includes Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde and Thomas Hoccleve's Letter of Cupid (an adaptation of Christine de Pizan's Epistre au dieu d'amours). Doyle argues that by pairing these texts, "the compiler gives Chaucer's masterpiece a French framework and helps construct a Chaucer who teaches women to be wary readers of [fin'amors] rhetoric" (76). In Chapter 4, Doyle returns to Chaucer's Anelida and Arcite, considering how this text is positioned within two anthologies created by John Shirley: British Library, Additional MS 16165 and Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R.3.20. In both manuscripts, Shirley situates Anelida and Arcite in a context that reinforces female skepticism of fin'amors rhetoric, placing Chaucer's poem alongside lyric poems that question the morality of courtly life and show the wide range of male intentions that women must interpret. Through prologues, headers, and marginal...