Who Is Buried in Chaucer’s Tomb?: Studies in the Reception of Chaucer’s Book by Joseph A. Dane

Abstract

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Gender and Language in Chaucer fruitfully examines the struggle with orthodoxy, sometimes playful, sometimes deadly serious, that marks much of Chaucer's work.Catherine Cox traces the chaotic trail of Chau­ cer's "subversive erotics" (p.132) through a diverse collection of texts, and argues, often successfully, that the poet refuses essentialist construc­ tions of gender (p.131).This is an important project, passionately un­ dertaken, but compromised by the occasional anachronistic reading and a weakness for convolution and neologism. SEALY GILLES Long Island University JOSEPH A.DANE.Who Is Buriedin Chaucer's Tomb?: Studies in the Reception of Chaucer's Book. East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998.Pp.ix, 309. The study of Chaucer developed largely independently of the study of the rest ofMiddle English, and over a much longer period, so today the Chaucerian edifice towers over everything else in Middle English.Jo­ seph Dane's book questions the security of the foundations on which this edifice is constructed; it interrogates the history of the reception of Chaucer and attacks some ofthe foundational assumptions and inherited wisdom on which the modern study ofChaucer rests.Dane sees Chaucer studies as enshrining various myths that, as the rather arch interrogative title of the book suggests, he wants to debunk. It's the kind of title that would usually send the professional medievalist running, with its hint that it ought to be on the shelf with the books about the true Arthur's grave or the secrets of the grail.The actual book, of course, conflicts entirely with this image, being in every other way framed as a respect­ able scholarly work, while the discussion of Chaucer's tomb turns out to be a highly erudite and often amusing analysis ofthe various things that are, were, or have been said to be on Chaucer's tomb (rather than in it). This play with readerly expectations is no doubt deliberate, because one of Dane's principal concerns here is the material realizations oftexts in books, specifically, the material realizations ofwhat he calls the Chau­ cer book.These "are to be distinguished from Chaucer's text[, which} is reproducible exactly....The Chaucer book, by contrast, is never repro338 REVIEWS ducible exactly, whether it is considered a manuscript, a printed book, or a group of book-copies of either kind" (p. 1). This is, then, a material history of Chaucerian reception, concerned not solely with what has been said about Chaucer but with the physical forms in which Chaucer has been presented and what they might have meant at different times. With ten chapters, introduction, and conclusion, this is a solid work. It follows Chaucerian reception roughly chronologically, moving from the discussion of the tomb to a consideration of Thynne's 15 32 edition, then to other blackletter Chaucers, before diverting into a discussion of Usk's (once "Chaucer's") Testament of Love, which takes us from Foxe's construction of Chaucer as a Wycliffite via the Testament, to the nine­ teenth century and W. W. Skeat's and Henry Bradley's solutions to the acrostic in this text and the attribution to Usk. Dane then addresses the eighteenth century, first looking at the vicissitudes of what he expresses as "[Chaucer's} Retraction" and then the reception of eighteenth-century editors. The final four chapters are more concerned with issues that have arisen in twentieth-century criticism and literary history: Jean Destrez's booklet theory and its possible impact on Chaucerian texts; notions of the Chaucerian persona in American Chaucer criticism from Kittredge onwards; internal and external evidence used in Chaucer editions; scribes as critics. The most valuable and refreshing thing about the book is Dane's con­ cern to give us a history of discontinuities and simultaneously to dispose of the smoothly coherent narrative generations of Chaucerians have con­ structed for their subject. He does this without explicit recourse to such prior models for this kind of approach as Hans Aarsleff's notion of a history of error, or Michel Foucault's various theorizings of discontinu­ ity. Instead, he works from the richly ideological raw material of Chau­ cerian reception itself, bringing to it a deep...