Chaucer Canon Research Articles

Contest, Translation, and the Chaucerian Text

Contest, Translation, and the Chaucerian Text

The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635

The Poet and the Antiquaries: Chaucerian Scholarship and the Rise of Literary History, 1532–1635

The Yeoman's Canon: On Toxic Mentors

The Yeoman's Canon:On Toxic Mentors Micah James Goodrich Beneath the writing on the wallis the writing it was designed to obscure. The two togetherform a third kind1 When a complaint is stripped of its legal fetters it is a lamentation. In fourteenth-century Middle English the verb compleinen meant both to grieve and to make a formal accusation or appeal.2 Complaint reflects the shadows of Latin complangere (com-[with] + plangere [to strike, beat oneself, mourn]) and French complaindre (from plaindre [weep, complain]), which highlight its deep association with lamentation. Pain made manifest. For a medieval audience, the Christian Latin planctus, past participle of plangere, captures the salvific stakes of publicizing lament. Making pain manifest is contingent on pain's disclosure to another. According to the Dictionnaire du moyen français, the medieval French verb plaindre means "manifester sa peine par des pleurs, des lamentations" (to manifest your pain through tears, lamentations).3 Elaine Scarry's formulation of pain as a destroyer of language suggests that complaint is "in many ways the nonpolitical equivalent of confession."4 However, as I show in this essay, complaint—as lamentation, legal redress, or confession—is political. [End Page 297] As Wendy Scase explains, when complaint is used in literature it concerns "the responsibilities of those in power to deliver social justice" and "becomes a metaphor for social processes and relationships."5 The politicization of complaint reveals the pain of abusive power structures. As a form of social disclosure, complaint percolates when consent is blurred, invalidated, or violated between people. Sara Ahmed's recent work on complaint has suggested that when the abuse of power is challenged through complaint, communities learn about power.6 Further, when our lamentations for redress and responsibility go unnoticed (or unmet), we still learn about power: "not being accommodated can be pedagogy."7 Chaucer was interested in the messiness of complaint. This brief essay turns to Chaucer's Canon's Yeoman's Prologue and Tale (CYPT) to examine how the abuse of power of a mentee (Yeoman) by a mentor (Canon) forces the victim to choose between the false protection of silence and the public disclosure of complaint. This choice is muddied in operations of consent politics because both actions place the burden of speech on the victim. I trace the Yeoman's decision to make the pain of violated consent manifest. In CYPT we see how an abusive mentor's misinterpretation of consent is based entirely on his fear that his actions will be made public. The Canon is afraid that the Yeoman's disclosure of their toxic working relationship is dangerous to his reputation and so he constructs his mentee's complaint as slander. Abusers contort consent by keeping their actions quiet: when a victim reveals abuse, the abuser claims the victim is speaking without their consent. Through this misdirection the abuser shows the design by which they held the victim's consent hostage to begin with.8 [End Page 298] The Yeoman becomes a vector of complaint as his livelihood is volleyed between two patriarchs: the Canon and the Host. Chaucer's CYPT is not the only relationship with a power problem among the pilgrims (consider the Prioress and the Second Nun, and the Prioress and the Nun's Priest, and even the Parson and the Plowman). Yet, CYPT is singular in that it depicts a work-based relationship between a mentor and his mentee. The title alone, "the prologe of the chanons yemannes tale" (Ellesmere MS, fol. 192r), suggests the possessive power between the two: the Yeoman belongs to the Canon. The Yeoman's relationship with his mentor is marked by community isolation, silencing, and lethal working conditions. When the Yeoman threatens disclosure, the Canon tries to silence him: "spek no wordes mo."9 Yet the Host encourages the Yeoman to continue his complaint, no matter what happens: "telle on, what so bityde" (CYP, 697). The Canon's eventual desertion of the pilgrimage stokes the fire that inflames the Yeoman's complaint. It is the abusive relationship between mentor and mentee that unveils the alchemical nature inherent in their work; the Yeoman's complaint makes manifest the toxicity of...

Chaucer's Pars Secunda Canon: A New Identification

Abstract Chaucer's conniving canon in pars secunda of the Canon's Yeoman's Tale has been traditionally identified with William Shuchirch, canon of the king's chapel at Windsor, on the basis of research undertaken almost a century ago by H. G. Richardson and J. M. Manly. Recent research, however, suggests that no such individual was ever present as a canon of Windsor. This article reexamines both Richardson's identification and Chaucer's links with Windsor, and provides a new Windsor candidate for Chaucer's canon character. It also reassesses Chaucer's connections with the law and legal proceedings, proposing a new hypothesis for the way in which pars secunda may have been inspired by the real-life story of “William Shuchirch.” This article contributes to efforts to place Chaucer within a historical context, as a man with complex professional networks, who interacted with the politics, law, and gossip of his age to draw inspiration for his writing.

“Take it as a tale”:

Abstract This article explores the prologue to the “Plowman's Tale,” an apocryphal inclusion to Chaucer's canon that participated in the construction of an expansive, productive, Chaucerian persona characteristic of early print editions of Chaucer's works. By reading this tale as if it really were an authentic part of the Canterbury Tales, this essay recontextualizes Chaucer by placing his authentic works alongside such anonymous inclusions, and argues that we can better understand the uncertain nature of the Tales themselves, and the complex status of their authentic author, by paying closer attention to such apocryphal texts.

The Vision of Piers Plowman, Said to be Wrote by Chaucer:

The Vision of Piers Plowman, Said to be Wrote by Chaucer:

Words, Stones, & Herbs: The Healing Word in Medieval and Early Modern England (review)

Reviewed by: Words, Stones, & Herbs: The Healing Word in Medieval and Early Modern England Lea T. Olsan Keywords medieval healing, power of words, reading, materiality, vernacular translation Louise M. Bishop . Words, Stones, & Herbs: The Healing Word in Medieval and Early Modern England. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 2007. Pp. xiv + 276. The phrase "words, stones, and herbs" in the title of Bishop's book derives from lines added to a Middle English translation of Gilbert the Englishman's [End Page 118] compendium of medicine, where it is said that God gives power to words, to herbs, and to stones. The tri-fold axiom was a commonplace that circulated mostly in Latin and usually carried the qualification that, of the three, words had the most power. Although the Gilbert quotation points straightforwardly to God as the source of the power in these elements, questions about exactly how these powers (virtus) operated led to sophisticated debates among high-profile medieval thinkers in the thirteenth century and generated doctrinal pronouncements that exacerbated fears of demonic involvement. Historians have subsequently examined medieval beliefs in the powers in stones, plants, and animals by studying conceptions of the properties of things, both ordinary and special, the influence of the stars, the capacities of demons, and reports of miracles. The power of words, especially the utilization of words and signs as a medical therapy, was a form of benevolent magic and marginal religious practice that was well known and widely practiced in the Middle Ages. Louise Bishop's book directs our attention away from medieval conceptions of the power of words employed in healing to the larger considerations of the "materiality" of medieval medicine, the healing powers of reading, the social construct of reading audiences, the significance of vernacular translations, and the political implications of self-help medical publications in the reign of Henry VIII. In Bishop's methodology, selected abstractions and metaphors are used to construct a historical social narrative. The "work joins medicine, materiality, vernacularity, and piety by reading medical texts literarily and literary texts medically." At the outset, she says, "[the book's] methodology is suggestive rather than exhaustive, cumulative rather than absolute." Bishop's project breaks ground because it brings together and cuts across disciplines and discourses in ways that more discipline-bound scholars rarely do. There are some positive results, as when in her Introduction (pp. 3-6), she explores the medical metaphors in Piers Plowman. Elsewhere the experiment does not work, either because a phrase under interpretation has been overloaded with irrelevant semantic content, as in the interpretation of the name of the remedy for the malady Noli me tangere, or because key interpretive terms such as "Galenic medicine" or "the feminine vernacular" are insufficiently or inaccurately explained. Bishop displays an admirably wide range of secondary reading and no lack of confidence in utilizing secondary sources to construct an argument. The risk here is that a seductive paradigm can highjack the argument, as does Harris Coulter's oversimplified idea that there existed from antiquity a divide between rationalist and empiricist medicine based on professional jealousy that led to a bias against non-university medicine in the Middle Ages and beyond. Unfortunately, this conception establishes a platform [End Page 119] for a social construction of medieval medicine that inaccurately sets the vernacular compilations and translations in opposition to learned Latin medicine. Bishop's first three chapters establish key interpretive terms: "Galenic medicine," "materiality," "healing word," "medical metaphors," "healing reading," and "vernacularity." Chapter 4 posits that the dangers of alchemical transmutation explicit in Chaucer's Canon's Yeoman's Prologue and Tale are analogous to the dangers of translation from Latin into the vernacular, with implied threats to the orthodox soul. The close readings of the tale lead to an excursus on the relation of alchemical transmutation and language translation. Chapter 5 treats the presence of women healers, however difficult they are to document, and Middle English translations of medical texts as interrelated phenomena. Then it examines Henry of Lancaster's Livre de seyntz medicine, which, like Piers Plowman, integrates medical metaphors into pious literature. Chapter 6 seeks to unpack the ways that one recipe—"For Noli me tangere," drawn from a...

CHAUCER AND 'ADAM SCRIVEYN'

The poem printed below occurs uniquely in Trinity College Cambridge, MS R. 3. 20, p. 367; my transcript is verbatim:1Adam scryveyne / if euer it bee byfalleBoece or Troylus / for to wryten nuweVnder by long lokkes / bowe most haue be scalleBut affter my makyng bowe wryt more truweSo offt adaye I mot by werk renuweIt to corect and eke to rubbe and scrape /And al is thorugh by necglygence and rapeThe poem is headed 'Ghanaers wordes a Geffrey vn to Adame his owen scryveyne.'2This poem has enjoyed an unquestioned place in the Chaucer canon since it was fiist printed by John Stow in his 1561 edition of The workes of Geffrey Chaucer, newly printed (STC 5075), fol. ccclvv. But there seem to be substantial grounds, some of a previously unremarked kind, for doubting that it is by Chaucer.3Trinity College R. 3. 20 is copied in the hand of John Shirley (f. 1366- £.1456), who is perforce the sole authority for the attribution of this poem to Chaucer. Shirley is a crucial figure in establishing the canon of Chaucer's shorter poems, a number of which are also included in modern editions on his authority alone, including The complaint of Mars' and The complaint of Venus', and 'Fortune', as well as possibly other poems that appear in manuscripts that seem to be Shirley-derived.4But Shirley has not been seen as uniformly reliable as an attributor. A number of poems he ascribes to Chaucer, included in manuscripts he himself copied, or which seem to derive from his own, now lost, originals, have never gained canonical acceptance: the ascription to Chaucer of The balade of a reeve' in BL, Add. MS 16165 nas not been endorsed by modern scholarship; nor has the 'cronycle made by Chaucier' in Bodleian Library, Ashmole 5 9. Other poems with which he is associated have excited similar unease in terms of their attribution.5 And there are other grounds for being doubtful about Shirley's attributional reliability, especially in relation to Lydgate.6The inclusion of 'Adam Scriveyn' (I will use this short form of the tide) within the Chaucer canon is open to doubt on a variety of grounds other than the substantial one of the uncertain authority of Shirley's attribution. Some of these grounds are of limited force: it is, for example, the only poem included in the Chaucer canon that comprises a single rhyme royal stanza.More significant may be lexical evidence. In the seven lines of the poem, there are five words that appear nowhere else in the canon - 'scryveyne' (line 1), 'scalle' (line 3), 'renuwe* (line 5), 'scrape* (line 6), 'rape* (line 7) - and four that are used in senses that occur nowhere else in the canon - truwe* (line 4) in the sense of accurately*; 'cored' (line 6) in the sense of 'remove errors'; 'rubbe* (line 6) in the sense of 'erase'. The last word in this second category, 'makyng* (line 4), is discussed below. Such a dense accumulation of unique occurrences in such a brief compass is without parallel in Chaucer's canonical lexis; it seems potentially significant.7To this evidence may be added that of the situation the poem appears to describe. The speaking voice complains about the errors of a scribe, errors that entail the necessity of the speaker engaging in 'rubbing and scraping'. The general assumption seems to have been that the complaint was directed by Chaucer to his Own' scribe. But put in such terms it is not easy to envision the situation: rubbing and scraping are specialist activities that would normally be undertaken by a scribe to a finished manuscript, that is one that has been completed in fair copy by (generally) a trained copyist, as Adam seems, at least notionally, to have been. At earlier stages in the compositional process such careful efforts at correction would lack necessity since less labour-intensive means of signalling correction would be appropriate: deletion, interlineation, or marginal corrections. Why would Chaucer, at the latest stage in production, be involved in the actual preparation of the final manuscript, doing tasks that fall within the purview of the skilled artisan? …

Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer; Lydgate, and their Books 1473–1557 by Alexandra Gillespie

524 Reviews and printed books just as he does about Latinate style in English texts, or about the complexities of William Worcester's reading practices. His work as awhole is a fine demonstration of how to use the physical features of books in the service of a study of reception and literaryhistory. Queen Mary, University of London Julia Boffey Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and theirBooks 1473 1557- By Alexandra Gillespie. (Oxford English Monographs) Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2006. xiv+281 pp. ?62. ISBN 978-0-19-926295-3. Not forAlexandra Gillespie 'the author as a by-product of the invention of print ing: the concept of the 'auctor, compiler, maker, or poet' (p. 3) was fully formed by the time of Caxton's firstproducts in 1473-74. Renaissance ideas of authorship were not so much reinvented from classical precedents as adapted from a medi eval model that is surprisingly complex. Chaucer offershis audience a notoriously mercurial author operating through amultiplicity of narrators and personae, while Lydgate in his Siege of Thebes reauthors Chaucer's Canterbury Tales to include himself as a pilgrim narrator of a new story. The commercial production of books inmanuscript, and the use of the author function within that process, were already well established by themid-fifteenth century, as the case of Lydgate's Troy Book demonstrates. Book ownership had by then become the province of bureaucrats, minor gentry, and wealthy merchants as well as of monks and members of the nobility. Booklets made by profes sional scribes added to the ease with which amateur copyists [...], moonlighting bureaucrats, and translator-poets' (p. 50) could produce texts.Caxton's innovative enterprises benefited from and were constrained by existing modes of production and marketing, such as the already flourishing trade in imported printed books. Authors were appropriated or forgotten, and texts transformed, by printers as theypromoted their commodities in response to themarket. At the end of Troilus and Criseyde Chaucer's anxiety about the reception of his composition is tempered by the knowledge thatmisreading is endemic, and that releasing his composi tion entails a loss of control over the text, its interpretation, and his authorship. His anxieties were well placed: publishers were eager to turn 'Chaucer' to their own advantage. In 1517 de Worde appended his own verse epilogue to Troilus, emphasizing Criseyde's guilt, as a means of increasing the poem's appeal to an audience with misogynist tendencies. Printers also exploited themedieval practice of collecting together lyricsby various hands under the general rubric of'Chaucer', thereby encouraging collectors and purchasers, but in the process Chaucer's canon and interpretative profile underwent significant change. Gillespie uses to good effectproblematic evidence such as that adduced from woodcuts and proverbs. Proverbs in particular?readily appropriated by worthy and unworthy alike?epitomize that textual instabilitywhich the printing press in tensified in itsheadlong pursuit of readers and profit.Editions of Lydgate's writings, from 1509 to 1534, show as much. They also reveal how private patronage, and MLR, 105.2, 2010 525 especially the developing system of royal privilege, could be exploited to promote theworth of a book and indeed its political usefulness through both word and image: cardinal Wolsey is depicted in Lydgate's 1527 Fall of Princes as a stable figureunaffected by the turning of Fortune's wheel. The Reformation press became ameans of authorizing the new dispensation?in part by giving themedieval past a new spin. The term 'Canterbury tale' comes to denote aworthless fiction thatmight imperil true piety.At the same time,Chaucer is appropriated by JohnFoxe and others as a Protestant avant la lettre.The Pilgrim's Tale, attributed to Chaucer inGrafton's 1542 Workes, is an anticlerical text pre sented as a Canterbury tale'. If such manoeuvres helped the reformist reputation of Chaucer, theywere also themeans whereby his other, authentic, 'worthless' fictions of a bygone age continued to circulate. Lydgate, too,was cherished by anti quarians as a repository of themedieval past, and one suddenly topical again when Catholicism was briefly restored inMarian England. For presenting such matters with thoroughness, scholarly acumen, and theoretical nous, Gillespie herself richly deserves that 'good utterance' sought by early publishers for their own books. University of...

Usurping "Chaucers dreame": Book of the Duchess and the Apocryphal Isle of Ladies

Usurping “Chaucers dreame”: Book of the Duchess and the Apocryphal Isle of Ladies Annika Farber In his 1598 edition of Chaucer's works, Thomas Speght added another dream vision, now known as the spurious Isle of Ladies , but then titled, "Chaucers dreame, neuer before this time published in print. That which heretofore hath gone vnder the name of his dreame, is the book of the Duchesse: or the death of Blanch Duchesse of Lancaster." 1 Isle steadfastly remained in the canon until the late nineteenth century and has since posed two kinds of questions for modern critics. On the one hand, those who study Isle alone concern themselves primarily with issues of dating and authorship and with saving this "flimsy airy fantasy" 2 from the neglect it has earned since being expelled from the Chaucer canon. On the other hand, those who work on the Book of the Duchess and attempt to trace the appearance of the text in print editions are "haunted by a doppelgänger of the poem, in title [End Page 207] though not in text." 3 These two poems, typically dealt with separately by modern critics, are undeniably linked by the realities of printing and reception. Pursuing this link further, that is, actually reading the Isle of Ladies in connection with Chaucer, allows us to see the poem in a new light, at once historical and interpretive. For fifteenth-century poets who were writing in the shadow of Chaucer, a reading of their texts with an eye to the Canterbury poet can reveal what may not have been seen when these poems were considered on their own. Alice Miskimin long ago called for "a return to the texts of the folios themselves, so long despised and ignored, for the wealth of their evidence of 'error' Elizabethans took for truth." 4 These "erroneous" interpretations, instead of being tossed aside as soon as we discover the "correct" reading of the text, can be used to reassess and rediscover the work. From such a study we find that there is a reason why Isle and the Book of the Duchess were so easily linked: the Isle -poet consciously imitated Chaucer, using the rhetorical technique of invention to create his own elaborate story indebted to the Book of the Duchess . To begin this revaluation of the Isle of Ladies , I will first focus on the context connecting Isle and Book of the Duchess as they originally appeared together in Speght's editions and then on nineteenth-century and modern conceptions of Chaucer and Isle as compared to sixteenth-century conceptions of the same. These issues of context and reception will function as a preface to my discussion of the Isle of Ladies itself as a Chaucerian imitation. Any reading of the Isle of Ladies and the Book of the Duchess together must begin with Speght's "arguments" to both poems, which provide an authoritative interpretation for the reader before he even begins the poems. The allegorical description of Isle that Speght gives can be found in both of his editions, unchanged except for punctuation: This dream deuised by Chaucer, seemeth to be a couert report of the mariage of Iohn of Gaunt the kings sonne with Blanch the daughter of Henry Duke of Lancaster, who after long loue, during the time whereof the Poet faineth them to be dead, were in the end by consent of friends happily married; figured by a bird bringing in her bill an hearbe, which restored them to life againe. Here also is shewed Chaucers match with a certaine Gentlewoman, who although shee was a stranger, 5 was notwithstanding so well liked and loued of the Lady [End Page 208] Blanch, and her Lord, as Chaucer himselfe also was, that gladly they concluded a marriage betweene them. (image 20) 6 Strengthening the link implied in the title that Speght gave to the poem, "Chaucers dreame," Speght's introduction argues that the Isle of Ladies functions as the story of the marriage of John and Blanche, forcing the unquestioning reader to read this poem as a companion piece to the Book of the Duchess . While Speght's description of Isle remains constant, the presentation of the...

Chaucer's Dead Body: From Corpse to Corpus (review)

Reviewed by: Chaucer’s Dead Body: From Corpse to Corpus Dosia Reichardt Prendergast, Thomas A. , Chaucer’s Dead Body: From Corpse to Corpus, New York/London, Routledge, 2004; cloth; pp. vii, 180; RRP £16.99; ISBN 0415966795. This is one of those strangely unclassifiable academic works that draw one down unexpected paths. Thomas Prendergast starts with the actual body and tomb of Chaucer and in a fascinating journey explores how the corpse, and the reception and re-making of Chaucer's body of work, come together over the last seven centuries. Prendergast avoids entering into a discussion about the editing of Chaucer manuscripts or the continuing debate about the order of The Canterbury Tales, but a summary might have been useful as an illustration of how canon formation occurs and especially since Chaucer has become synonymous with only one portion of his entire corpus, The Canterbury Tales. Of the 84 surviving manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales (55 of which are 'complete'), none is in [End Page 192] Chaucer's own hand and yet Chaucer's authorship has never been in doubt. However, scribal choices have been made on the 'original' tales and editorial choices have been made on the various manuscripts – either in an attempt to recover the postulated Chaucerian 'original' or to provide structure and sense for the reader who is contemporary to the editor(s). Only two of the extant manuscripts have found favour with editors – Hengwrt and the Ellesmere. The former is the earliest of the surviving manuscripts and may have been produced in the year of Chaucer's death as a result of which it is assumed to be the closest to the author's intentions. Physically, however, it is rather tatty, incomplete and has been rebound several times. The Ellesmere is a much clearer text and is the most famous literary treasure in the Huntington Library's collections. The pages are embellished with floriated borders, illuminated initials, and other decorations, as well as 23 portraits of the pilgrim-storytellers. These illustrations as a whole disappear from every contemporary edition, but Prendergast sticks to his equation of text with body and does not deal with the excision of such matter. The book really begins in Westminster Abbey with some anecdotes about the location and re-location of Chaucer's body, which had not been allowed to rest in peace after all. It was 'translated' to the altar tomb in the south transept by the mysterious Catholic Nicholas Brigham in 1566. However, a belief arose that the body had never been moved to the tomb built by Brigham and that Dryden had been buried in Chaucer's place. Problems of confused identity came to a head in the nineteenth century, at the same time that a controversy arose over the upkeep of the tomb. Dean Stanley had serious doubts about the location of the body and solved them by having a large stone cut with the inscription, 'NEAR THIS STONE LIE BURIED Geoffrey Chaucer 1400, John Dryden, 1700…' As Chaucer now stood at the head of English poetry his tomb was a sort of secular shrine, which could bind London with Canterbury, nation and religion. Prendergast follows the twin translations of Chaucer's body and his works – one to the altar tomb and the other, ironically, via Dryden's re-writing of Chaucer into the vernacular. Dryden did not want Chaucer to remain available only to an elite and was criticized then and later (by Hazlitt for instance) for pandering to the taste of the readers of his own time rather than letting them have acquaintance with the original. In subsequent chapters Prendergast looks at nineteenth-century responses to tomb and to text and at the last great 'purification' of Chaucer's legacy. Part of this involved criticising an early 'canon-maker', the antiquarian John Stow who added some 17 works to the Chaucer canon in his 1561 edition. The final chapter brings us up to date with modernist formulations that effectively [End Page 193] disembody Chaucer and the paradox that Chaucer, having been selected as the 'father of English poetry', becomes less representative of his age and disconnected from his own poetic tradition. This, however, may...

"In Hir Tellyng Difference": Gender, Authority, and Interpretation in the Tale of Melibee

"In Hir Tellyng Difference":Gender, Authority, and Interpretation in the Tale of Melibee Amanda Walling The Tale of Melibee has long occupied a place both marginal and highly contested within the Canterbury Tales. Although its inclusion in the Chaucer canon has brought it readers and critical attention, the tale itself resists canonization by proclaiming its own debts to other authors. The second tale offered by Chaucer's pilgrim persona is a translation of Renaud de Louens's Livre de Mellibee et Prudence, itself an abridged translation of Albertanus of Brescia's Liber de consolationis et consilii, and is mostly comprised of a dense catalogue of citations from scriptural, classical, and patristic authorities, loosely bound by an allegorical narrative. Even as it insists on its own secondariness, however, the tale explores the rhetorical and gendered contexts that shape the transmission of authoritative texts. As Melibee debates the relative merits of peace and war with his sententious wife, Prudence, their use of these texts raises many of the same gender issues that trouble the rest of the Canterbury Tales. Melibee initially rejects Prudence's counsel on antifeminist grounds, and, in her attempts to justify herself, gender emerges as a key interpretive principle in the handling of authoritative texts. Charting the ramifications of textual and gender difference, the tale invites us to reconsider both the forms of difference that define its own place in the canon and the place of such "tellyng difference" (VII 948)1 in Chaucer's constructions of authority and authorship. Although the question of gender emerges in Melibee in the familiar terms of antifeminist attack, its implications reach far beyond Melibee's broad generalizations about the character of women. In Melibee, as elsewhere in the Canterbury Tales, debates about gender, typically rooted in authoritative texts, are also debates about the function and meaning of those texts. Although Prudence's interpretations of her authorities are identified as feminine in various ways throughout the tale, her readings are not gendered simply because she herself is. Melibee is concerned with the ways in which gender is refracted in language, and with how texts [End Page 163] and their reiterations make visible both the gendered conditions of their production and the gendered social structures that shape how those texts are used. For an author like Chaucer, approaching a tradition that identifies itself as masculine (and does so partly through the mechanism of antifeminist discourse), the feminine has the potential to signify the differences of context and purpose that set his own work apart from its models. The inflections of gender in Prudence's handling of her texts remind us that citation and translation never passively adopt borrowed authority. In thematizing the difference that emerges in citation, the Tale of Melibee illustrates how Chaucer uses tropes of gender to construct and interrogate his own authorship. We can therefore read Chaucer's authorship of Melibee not only in his alterations to his source material, but in the tale's own insistence on the permeability of authority and meaning. Rather than asserting his own direct authority over the text, Chaucer presents a tale that challenges the ability of texts to sustain authority and that bypasses the familiar tropes of self-aggrandizement and false humility in favor of the many forms of difference that constitute authorship. Compilation and the Agency of Prudence As Prudence uses her texts to dissuade Melibee from his warmongering, the tale examines how past authority can be brought to bear on the concrete problems of individual lives through the agency of prudence. Indeed, the agency of Prudence herself is very much at stake in the tale, since prudence is the virtue capable of arranging worldly affairs and turning principle into action.2 Readers often overlook this agency when they conflate Prudence with her citations, taking her only as a compilation and not as a compiler. In fact, she is both: although her character is in many ways the sum of her texts, the tale also suggests a distinct agency for her that is rhetorical, interpretive, and closely attuned to gender. Although, as A. J. Minnis has noted, compilatio offers medieval writers a means of deflecting attention from or even disavowing responsibility for the...

Translating Thebes: Lydgate's Siege of Thebes and Stow's Chaucer

John Stow’s 1561 edition of The Workes of Geffrey Chaucer prints John Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes among the “diuers addicions” that amplify and enhance the prestige of the Chaucer canon. The effect of this addition is also to translate Lydgate’s poem to a new context. Stow relocates a work of Lancastrian dynastic propaganda within an early-Elizabethan discourse on governance. Stow’s textual sources, the make-up of his book, and the specific readings he adopts reflect his concerns with antiquities and citizen history; and they open up broad questions about the nature of monarchy, nationhood, and political authority.

Gerveys Joins the Fun: A Note on Viritoot in the Miller's Tale

The meaning of upon the has perplexed editors and critics, who offer a range of definitions and interpretations of this unusual phrase. The obscurity of viritoot, which occurs only once in the Chaucer canon, has led some scholars to question the spelling or accepted rendition of this term, but as Walter Skeat notes, viritoot must be accepted as the read ing; the reading verytrot in MS. HI. gives a false rime, as the oo in woot is long. The meaning is unknown; but the context requires the sense of 'upon the move,' or 'astir.'2 Since Skeat's edition of the Canterbury Tales was first published in 1894, subsequent editors of Chaucer have adopted 'astir' or 'upon the move' as the most probable meaning of viritoot. Thus Thomas Ross follows the editing tradition of Skeat and glosses as 'turn all';3 Robert Pratt suggests 'frisk, whirl';4 Manly and Rickert footnote line 3770 of the Miller's Tale by listing numerous spellings and renditions of viritoot, but produce no new insights or definitions;5 Fred Robinson offers 'swift movement?';6 and in the latest comprehensive edition of Chaucer's work, Larry Benson adopts 'astir.'7 Some recent scholars offer interpretations of that vary from the editing tradition established by Skeat. Edmund Reiss argues that means 'true devil,' a reference to the folklore which likens the blacksmith Gerveys to Satan and his forge to the fires of hell.8 A. C. Breeze proposes 'fairytoot' as the meaning of and concludes that Gerveys treats Absolon something like a nocturnal sentinel instead of a nocturnal prowler.9 Jeffrey Singman argues that viritoot conveys to the reader the

Proverbial Chaucer and the Chaucer Canon

rT v he history of the Chaucer canon begins with fifteenth-century manuscripts and the variety of ways in which they have preserved information about Chaucer's authorship of particular texts. Most obviously, this information takes the form of scribal attribution, although it also includes testimony offered by other authors (Lydgate and Gower, for example), or internal evidence such as the eagle's identification of Chaucer in The House of Fame, or the revealing biographical details of the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women.1 These categories of information are not wholly unproblematical: considerable skepticism has been expressed, for example, about the validity of the scribal notes that attach Chaucer's name to the short poems Womanly Noblesse and To Rosemounde2 and about the nature of Chaucer's connection with the various fragments of The Romaunt of the Rose;3 and recent studies have begun to demonstrate that a variety of powerful factors were at work on even the very early processes of canon formation.4 The influential roles of early Chaucer promoters such as the fifteenth-century scribe John Shirley or the sixteenth-century antiquary John Stow are also currently under investigation that seems likely to question or at least to expose for consideration the weight of their authority.5 The construction, over

The Disenchanted Self: Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales by H. Marshall Leicester, Jr.

REVIEWS the "optimist" readers who believe that Langland was announcing the coming of a better world, she is unlikely to convert the Langland pessimists who think that the author of Piers could hardly have been an optimist since there is no clearly optimistic statement about the future at poem's end. Be that as it may, this study is so thoughtful, original, and well informed that every open-minded student of Piers Plowman is bound to profit from it. ROBERT E. LERNER Northwestern University H. MARSHALL LEICESTER, JR. The Disenchanted Self Representing the Subject in the Canterbury Tales. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1990. Pp.xii, 451. $55.00 cloth, $17.95 paper. On the one hand, we have in Marshall Leicester a critic so congenially in the groove of traditional, not to say old-fashioned, Chaucer studies that he can say as he begins his peroration, "What seem to me to be the two best treatments of the General Prologue, E. Talbot Donaldson's 'Chaucer the Pilgrim,' and Jill Mann's Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire, between them outline the general structure of Chaucerian practice in the Canter­ bury Tales, the telling of tales as the interaction between a subject and an institution" (p. 383). On the other hand, the chapter that he begins that way, "Conclusion: The Disenchanted Self," is headed by three epigraphs. One is a well-known couplet from The Canon's Yeoman's Prologue, "'I am nat wont in no mirour to prie / But swynke soore and lerne multiplie' " (lines 668-69), but the other two, which bracket the Chaucerian lines at the top of the page, are fromJacques Derrida's "Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences" and from Roland Barthes's The Pleasure ofthe Text. And by the time the readers reach this point, more than nine­ tenths of the way through this dense and intricate study, nothing would surprise them less than this matter-of-fact juxtaposition. Leicester's book, like the contributions of Donaldson, Mann, Hoffman, Muscatine, and all the other giants in the history of Chaucerian scholarship and commentary, sits even now at a crucial point in the path of further explorationsof the meaningand significance of the Chaucer canon: there is no way past them but through them. That is, such works, Leicester's 167 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER included, will need to be cited not to show respect for one's predecessors, or evento show the proper scholarly diligence in cultivating one's Sitzfleisch in the carrels, but simply because each of them contributes tothe understand­ ing of our subject in such a way that to ignore them is to be, well, ignorant. Well, what, then, is Leicester doing? He is trying to understand how the various narrating voices of The Canterbury Tales do their job and what job it is they end up doing. To this end he concentrates on only a few of the many narrators involved, but on the ones for whom his sharply observed distinc­ tions make the greatest difference, which turns out to mean, in the main, the most interesting ones: the narrator of The General Prologue, the Knight, the Wife of Bath, the Pardoner. Along the way many other narrators and tales come into play-almost all of them, in fact-but The DisenchantedSeifis not areading of The Canterbury Tales as a whole. It is a form of analytical play, and this play is directed toward the intertwinings, the intricacies, and the puzzles that attend the shadowy alternations of narrational presence and absence. Like all other modern theorists from Saussure forward, Leicester is fond of distinctions-between "self" and "subject," between "masculine" and "feminine" forms of disenchantment-fond of establishing categories and terms, especially those that can be delivered to us already compromised by the self-effacement of ironic figuration-"Leicester's razor," for example, which is the name he bestows on his Latin maxim, "Narratores non sunt multiplicandi sine absolute necessitate," and fond of every kind of verbal play that is strong enough to bear the title of wit, whether it originates in Lacan-/e Nom-du-Pere, le Non-du-Pere...

The Literature of Alchemy and Chaucer's Canon's Yeoman's Tale: Framework, Theme, and Characters

THIS paper is concerned not with the specifics of alchemy in the Canon's Yeoman's Tale i.e., the yeoman's garbled but nevertheless very full account of the contents of his master's laboratory and of the activities carried on therein' but rather with the contribution of the literature of alchemy to other aspects of the tale: to framework, theme, and characters. Especially, it undertakes to demonstrate that in portraying the yeoman-narrator, the alchemist-canon, and the canon and priest of Secunda Pars Chaucer made significant use of the alchemical treatises and other writings about alchemy available to him at the end of the fourteenth century. Presumption of his reliance upon written documents in this instance is in keeping with his frequently avowed dependence for inspiration and material upon bokes olde and newe and is buttressed by scholarly investigations which have demonstrated his creation of complex human beings, very much alive, from bookish materials: treatises on medicine, physiognomy, dream and astrology; antifeminist writings of the church fathers; scriptural commentary and the like. One calls to mind his transformation of learned lore in the instances of the Summoner, the Pardoner, the more than half human rooster Chantecleer, that magnificently complex human being the Wife of Bath. This is not to deprecate the suggestion that Chaucer may have had personal and perhaps extensive and unfortunate acquaintance with one or more practicing alchemists of his day. Indeed, as one reads the Yeoman's account of his Canon's experimentings and as he experiences the ever-mounting bitterness of the Yeoman's denunciation of the elvysshe nice lore, he is likely to be overwhelmed by the vivid immediacy of the recital and to feel that toward its end the yeoman in his denunciation becomes indistinguishable from Chaucer himself a Chaucer who knows by personal experience whereof he speaks and delivers his advice and conclusion: I rede, as for the beste, lete it goon, with a vivid personal commitment. Several years ago Mr H. G. Richardson2 discovered in the Plea Rolls of Edward III for 1374 evidence of a canon of the royal chapel at Windsor who was also apparently a practising alchemist. At least, when William de Brumley. a

Chaucer's Canon and The Unity of The Canon's Yeoman's Tale

Students of The Canterbury Tales have devoted relatively slight attention to the incident of the Canon at Boughton under Blee and to his Yeoman's tale, and even of this they have not given much to the Canon himself. H. G. Richardson and J. M. Manly investigated possible historical models for him, and Marie P. Hamilton has shown that he was a Canon Regular. But apart from these, discussion has been confined mainly to the sources and extent of Chaucer's alchemical knowledge, the possible audience for the tale considered apart from the Canterbury group, and the character of the Yeoman, so much more fully developed than that of his master.

The Seven Planets

Heather surveys astrological references in a range of Middle English works, focusing particularly on beliefs about the planets. Gower's treatment of astrology is frequently sampled (especially 339-47), and Heather quotes lengthy passages from the CA, particularly Book 7. It is noted that matches up the days of the week with the planets, and in turn connects the latter to the twelve signs of the zodiac (342) and to the fifteen stars (344-46). Also mentioned are isolated references to astrology in stories such as Medea and Jason and Nectanabus. Heather's evaluation of Gower's contribution to astrology is summed up in relation to Chaucer's work on the same subject: Gower was concerned in presenting to his countrymen what had previously been written on the subject, and may well have had a greater part in moulding their belief in such matters. Chaucer on the other hand wrote rather as one who was weighing the value of the beliefs as they existed in his day and makes no secret of his scepticism (351). Other brief references to Gower's work in the remainder of the essay include: a discussion of how Book 4 of the CA relates the subject of alchemy to the planets; a comparison between Chaucer's Canon Yeoman's Tale and Gower's description in Book 5 of Greek and Chaldean religions and their basis in astrology; a discussion of Gower's beliefs about light and darkness; the quotation of some references to the moon in the CA that describe its phases and its influence upon the tides; and an overview of beliefs about eclipses and their causes. [CvD]

The "Secree of Secrees" of Chaucer's Canon's Yeoman

The "Secree of Secrees" of Chaucer's Canon's Yeoman