Writing after Chaucer: Essential Readings in Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century (review)

Abstract

304 Reviews relationship with the crusaders than has hitherto been thought. There is a good deal to be grateful for in this collection. But one has a feeling of erudition being deployed towards the edges of a field where big things are stirring in the middle. A short introduction by Jonathan Riley-Smith alerts readers to the need to rethink the crusade. W e must re-examine the narrative sources in Latin, and pay more attention to material in Arabic. More important, however, is data in cartularies which historians of the crusade have never used. Riley-Smith tells us that he has discovered in them the names of over 200 participants in the first crusade w h o do not appear in narrative texts, and such a dramatic widening of the body of evidence will reshape our approach to the crusade. A s it happens, he has recently produced a major book utilising this material (The First Crusaders, 1095-1131, Cambridge, 1998) and it m a y be that readers interested in the crusade will wish to make this book the one they read first. John Moorhead Department ofHistory University of Queensland Pinti, Daniel J., ed., Writing after Chaucer: Essential Readings in Chaucer and the Fifteenth Century (Basic Readings in Chaucer and his Time 1), N e w York and London, Garland, 1998; board; pp. xiv, 279; R.R.P. US$70.00. Writing After Chaucer is the initial volume in the series Basic in Chaucer and His Time. Although this is a new series of critical essays on Chaucer, its primary purpose is to provide easy access to important recent criticism by offering reprints of significant essays that have apppeared within the last fifty years. In adopting such an Reviews 305 approach the series editors, Christian Zacher of Ohio State University and Paul Szarmach of Western Michigan University, have been motivated by the desire 'to compensate for new publications patterns and changed library acquisitions policies in serials and retrospective titles'—a situation with which most of us are only too familiar in the current climate of reduced budgets and funding cuts. Daniel Pinti's collection of twelve essays on the transmission and reception of Chaucer's poetry in the century immediately following his death fulfills the objectives of the series admirably. The particular area of Chaucer studies on which Pinti has chosen to focus is one of increasing interest to Chaucer scholars. Moreover, the essays he has selected cover a range of topics and introduce the reader to current scholarly opinion and debate. Only one of the twelve essays has been specially commissioned for the volume and that is Stephen Partridge's 'Questions of Evidence: Manuscripts and the Early History of Chaucer's Works'. Partridge's essay is directed at those accustomed to reading Chaucer in modern critical editions and is designed to give such readers a basic understanding of the manuscript culture in which Chaucer's works were produced and circulated. It is supported by an extensive bibliography and, in addition, incorporates some helpful suggestions for further reading. Consequently, it is not only an ideal essay with which to begin such a collection but is also a valuable resource for anyone wishing to pursue the study of medieval manuscripts in more detail. The essays of Bary Windeatt and Susan Schibanoff which follow that of Partridge reinforce the importance of manuscript study by illustrating the vital role manuscript evidence can play in enhancing our understanding and appreciation of Chaucer's achievement. Windeatt's "The Scribes as Chaucer's Early Critics' whichfirstappeared in 1979, shows that the variants produced by 306 Reviews scribes are not always worthless aberrations, but can, in m a n y cases, help us to identify the features of Chaucer's poetry his near contemporaries found to be distinctive. By viewing scribal variation in a positive rather than a negative light the essay has been instrumental in changing critical attitudes to the work of scribes and has helped to stimulate much of the revisionist tWnking about scribal practices that has taken place in recent years. Schibanoff's essay, 'The N e w Reader and Female Textuality in T w o Early Commentaries on Chaucer', published almost...