Chaucer's Poetry Research Articles

New Perspectives in Chaucer Criticism ed. by Donald M. Rose

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER account of the procedures he carried out, and, except for the implications of his commentary, the reader has no way of knowing whether the exam­ ples given are complete, representative in their numbers, the most striking instances, or a mere random selection. This absence of scholarly rigor will make it difficult for others to use the frequently interesting material that Roscow assembles. What we have in the book is a set of observations on a number of syntactical features, some of which contribute to Chaucer's style. We also have a series of critical comments on Margaret Schlauch's exemplary PMLA article published in 1952, "Chaucer's Colloquial Eng­ lish: Its Structural Traits." At one point (p. 47) Roscow quotes half of Schlauch's discussion of a syntactic feature as if it were the whole. At no point does he do justice to the balance, sensitivity, and scholarly control of her presentation. The book includes a general index and a useful "Index of Chaucer Quotations." The bibliography, confined to references in the book, shows somesurprisingimbalancesandomissions.Spearingappearsfivetimes;J.A. Burrow and]. A. W. Bennett, twice each. The Tatlock-Kennedy Concor­ dance and Muscatine do not appear. Medieval poetics and modern stylistics have each a single item. CHARLES A. OWEN,JR. University of Connecticut DONALD M. ROSE, ed., New Perspectives in Chaucer Criticism. Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1982. Pp. x, 248. $21.95. This volume comprises a collection of revised papers, originally read at the conference of the New Chaucer Society in New Orleans in April, 1980, and here organized into three broad thematic sections. But first, George Kane, in an opening paper ("Langland and Chaucer: An Obligatory Compari­ son"), compares aspects of Chaucer and Langland and modern reactions to them, justly remarking on the extent to which critics of either poet, by ignoring the existence of the other, miss some illuminating comparisons. Kane points out some shared elements in the two poets' education: "rigorous inculcation of Christian doctrine," some experience of the "alle202 REVIEWS gorizing activities ofthe classicizing friars," and some knowledge ofthat "old system ofmoral categorizing,estates satire," together with the com­ mon basis of their education in Latin grammar. Kane speculates on Langland's knowledge of profane rhetoric or of courtly and Arthurian literature,as well as on Chaucer's knowledge ofFrench religious allegories or ofantifraternal literature.An interesting comparison follows on the two poets' conception ofthemselves as artists.Along with a self-consciousness about their art and a common tendency to invoke modesty topoi, there is also aself-confidence approaching arrogance discernible in both poets,and that this emerges in two poets in comparable degrees at this period "bespeaks a new condition of poetry in post-conquest England." Both poets also register in their poems their personal problems of art and morality, and Kane compares the implications of Chaucer's Retractions with Langland's allusions within his poetry to doubts about his own poetic activity ("The poet sees,ifonly momentarily,the act ofcomposition as self­ gratifying and therefore, to the extent that it fails in charity, sinful notwithstanding its ostensible pious objectives ofspiritual understanding and moral reform. Here is the real abjectness.... By contrast Chaucer's 'retracciouns' seem serene,almost confident."). Part 2 of the book consists of five essays on various aspects of literary theory,modern and medieval,as applied to Chaucer.In his essay "Con­ temporary Literary Theory and Chaucer," Morton W.Bloomfield discusses "what aspects of modern disciplines are...useful in interpreting and evaluating literature," and he reviews the claims ofsemantics,semiology, literature and philosophy, the concept of speech acts, psychology, and sociology.On the study ofsocial aspects ofliterature Bloomfield comments that "audience and reader are not to be limited to the 'real' author and reader, but may include the internal audience and reader who are both presupposed in and even brought into Chaucer's poetry." Little has yet been said on that internal audience to whom the so-much-discussed author-persona is presumably speaking.And in an interesting comparison of MLT and the tale of Alatiel in Decameron, Bloomfield himselfantici­ pates those advances in the study ofnarratology and literary structuralism he predicts in Chaucer criticism.His concluding...

John P. Hermann and John J. Burke Jr., eds., Signs and Symbols in Chaucer's Poetry. University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1981. Pp. 257; 31 illustrations. $19.75 (cloth); $9.95 (paper).

John P. Hermann and John J. Burke Jr., eds., Signs and Symbols in Chaucer's Poetry. University, Ala.: University of Alabama Press, 1981. Pp. 257; 31 illustrations. $19.75 (cloth); $9.95 (paper).

Transdisciplinary intersections: Astronomy and three early english poets

AbstractAstronomical or astrological knowledge enables scholars to decode scientific or metaphorical allusions in the poetry of Chaucer, Skelton, and Donne and sometimes to date the composition of the works.

Medieval Body Language: A Study of the Use of Gesture in Chaucer's Poetry

Medieval Body Language: A Study of the Use of Gesture in Chaucer's Poetry

The Poetry of Chaucer. Chaucer, John Gardner

<i>The Poetry of Chaucer</i>. Chaucer, John Gardner

The Genre of ‘Troilus and Criseyde’ by Mona E. McAlpine

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER It would be unreasonable and unrealistic to ask for a more detailed search than that which Professor Lewis has carried out. One can quibble with the placement of notes at the ends of chapters, a more inconvenient spot than at either the foot of each page or at the end of the volume; one can regret the absence of running heads, especially in the edition itself. But these are matters probably decided by the University of Georgia Press. Much of the material in the volume is authoritative, as Lewis argues: he has consulted (but not collated) all but four of the 672 known manuscripts, he has likely exhausted the question of title variations, and he has provided much information concerning variant readings. Still, a critical edition of De Miseria continues to promise greater usefulness than does his unemended transcription of a "typical" manuscript that dates from within fifty years of Innocent's writing De Miseria. In no way do I mean to question the integrity of Professor Lewis' work in the way I have questioned some of his procedures and conclusions, but I am at a loss to say who could find this book of use. It purports to be neither what Innocent wrote nor what Chaucer read. The elaborate and extensive apparatus does not in any reasonably simple way provide retrievable information. The text itself is based on a manuscript that has no authority of any kind. Thus the first volume of the Chaucer Library demonstrates that it is impossible to establish all ofthe texts ofChaucer's library. At those points at which De Miseria seems to be the source for Chaucer's poetry, the text of Lewis' edition differs in no substantial way from Maccarrone's. It is not simply that Chaucer's manuscript of De Miseria has not been found; more to the point, it appears that there is insufficient evidence on which to base so extensive a search. It is still not clear whether Chaucer used De Miseria or instead got his materials from some other source. This edition calls into question whether it is feasible to expect that we can recover all of Chaucer's library. DANIEL SILVIA University of California, Davis MONA E. MCALPINE, The Genre of 'Troilus and Criseyde.' Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1978. Pp. 252. $12.50. Chaucer's reference to Troilus and Criseyde as "litel myn tragedie" ought to have established the genre of his poem. But, from Sydney's time 172 REVIEWS to our own, no definition of tragedy proposed has satisfied all readers as the correct accounting of Chaucer's generic procedure in the poem itself. Indeed, some critics have ignored this designation and found the poem more like a romance, or a novel, or an epic, or some combination of genres. McAlpine offers a new and consistent reading of Chaucer's generic intentions, one which takes into account the fact that his reference to tragedy appears quite late in the poem as the tentative attribution of a persona who has never been quite sure of his poetic bearings. This persona, she says, has been making rhetorical gestures in the direction of a de casibus tragedy modeled on Boccaccio: a tragedy of Fortune, or a tragedy of the proud man. His poem, however, has concentrated on the spiritual changes in lovers, not on material prosper­ ity and decline, and he has devoted nearly equal attention to Criseyde, who is not the principal victim of Fortune nor the proud man. His attribution, therefore, does not account for his practice. But Chaucer, who created him, had serious reasons for calling the poem a tragedy, and for referring to comedy in the next line. As a searching student and translator of the Consolation ofPhilosophy, he had invented and written the first truly Boethian tragedy and comedy, the structure of which is philosophically justified by the nature of the choices his two central characters make. McAlpine's solution to the generic problem thus defines tragedy in such a way as to solve many other problems of recent Troilus scholarship, those raised by the intrusive and vacillating narrative persona, by the centrality of love as his...

Chaucer’s Merchants and the Foreign Exchange: An Introduction to Medieval Finance

Chaucer's Merchants and the Foreign Exchange: An Introduction to Medieval Finance Kenneth S. Cahn EM the financial tmnsattions desniool in Th, Cant,,,.bury Tale,, it is impossible to conclude-as many Chaucer scholars have-that the merchant was a usurer or any type of money lender. 1 Contrary to most opinion, he did not deal profitably in monetary exchange2 by speculat­ ing, or in any other manner, legal3 or illegal.4 That he was in debt is stated in the poem more than once. 5 His activities have been incorrectly 1 The Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F.N.Robinson,2nd ed.(Boston: Houghton, 1957),p.658n; Thomas A.Knott,"Chaucer's Anonymous Merchant," PQ, 1(1922), 12,14; John M.Manly,Some New Light on Chaucer(1926; rpt.Gloucester,Mass.: Peter Smith, 1959), p. 192; Muriel Bowden, A Commentary on the General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales(NewYork: Macmillan, 1948), p. 148. 2 Chaucer's Poetry, ed.E.T.Donaldson(NewYork: Ronald,1975),p.14; OscarE. Johnson, "Was Chaucer's Merchant in Debt) A Study in Chaucerian Syntax and Rhetoric," JEGP, 52 (1953), 50. 3 B.A.Park,"The Character ofChaucer's Merchant," ELN, l(1964),169-70; The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed.W.W.Skeac (Oxford: Clarendon Press,189497 ),V,30; Frederick Tupper,Types ofSociety in Medieval Literature(NewYork: H.Holt, 1926), p. 44. 4 See,in addition to the works cited in footnotes 1 and 2 above,Jill Mann,Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire(Cambridge: Cambridge Univ.Press,1973),pp.100-01; The Canterbury Tales ofGeoffrey Chaucer, ed.D.Cook(NewYork: Doubleday Anchor,1961), p.21 and Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, ed.D.R.Howard(NewYork: Signet, 1969),p.72; perhaps a position was taken by John K.Crane,"An Honest Debtor): A Note on Chaucer's Merchant,Line A276," ELN, 4(1966),81-85,who writes chat in "a deeperhistoricalcontext...themerchanthas probably committed every money crime in the book." > Only one line has been interpreted co mean chat the merchant was in debt: "Ther wisce no wight chat he was in dette "(I,280),and Johnson,pp.50,57 argues that the correct meaning for that line is "he was emphatically out of debt." See also,Gardiner Stillwell, "Chaucer's Merchant: No Debts?" JEGP, 57(1958), 192, 194; Park, pp. 172-73. 81 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER associated with smuggling gold out ofthe country6 and smuggling false, light, or clipped money into the country. 7 Such operations, for Chaucer's merchant, were not only economically improbable, but in some in­ stances physically impossible. Until recently, many commentators have failed to distinguish be­ tween two different types of medieval monetary exchange8 and have shown themselves confused about such matters as the nature of the "sheeld," which has been described as a French coin9 or a gold coin10 but was, in fact, neither French, nor gold, nor a coin. In the Middle Ages to sell shields meant to borrow sterling. 1. Foreign Exchange: Historical Background The medieval banking systems are not simple, and the foreign exchange is particularly complex. Centuries ago, the foreign exchange was called "the greatest and weightiest mystery to be found on the whole map of trade," and since then major economic historians who discussed exchange have cited this line and echoed the sentiment about the difficulties of the subject matter. Indeed, even those who actively participate in it do not fully understand the modern exchange market, and its structures are certainly not identical to those ofthe market in the Middle Ages. 11 Confusion of aspects of the banking, lending, and exchange systems extant in Europe in Chaucer's time has generated considerable misunderstanding of the actions of Chaucer's merchants. 6 Bowden, p. 150. 7 Knott, pp. 10-11. 8 Bowden, pp. 148-50 and 154n; Knott, pp. 10-12; Ewald Fliigel, "Gower's Mirour de l'omme und Chaucer's Prolog," Anglia, 24 (1901), 474-76; Robinson, p. 658. Park, pp. 169-70, seems to be the first to distinguish manual exchange from foreign exchange. 9 Bowden, p. 150n; Cook, p. 21; Donaldson, p. 14; Park, p. 169: Robinson, p. 658; Skeat, V. 30. 10 Howard, p...

De Miseria Condicionis Humane ed. by Robert E. Lewis

REVIEWS forth. The obvious difficulty is in deciding which correspondences, though real, lie beyond the probability of Chaucer's intent. Chaucer, indeed, often lets little details carry immense significance for character. Haskell's volume, for analyzing (but not exhausting) one under-investigated source of these, is worth the attention of Chaucer scholars. THOMAS R. LISZKA The University of Illinois at Chicago Circle ROBERT E. LEWIS, ed., De Miseria Condicionis Humane. By Lotario dei Segni (Pope Innocent Ill). The Chaucer Library. Athens: Universi­ ty of Georgia Press, 1978. Pp. xiv, 303. $25. It stands to reason that Chaucer could have read the treatise De Miseria Humane Conditionis, also called De Contemptu Mundi. The work was well-known and extremely popular; beyond that, the G version of the Prologue to The Legend ofGood Women claims that the poet translated "of the Wreched Engendrynge of Mankynde, As man may in pope Innocent yfynde" (G, 414-15). Ifin fact he did make such a translation (it has never been found), Chaucer never later in his poetry used materials from De Miseria in the same extensive way that he did those from The Consolation ofPhilosophy after he translated it. In the case of De Miseria, moreover, all passages of Chaucer's poetry that exhibit any influence from the work can have derived their materials from sources other than De Miseria itself-all, that is, except for perhaps a few passages in The Man of Law's Prologue and Tale. The Chaucer Library was created in order to answer questions about the relationship of the poet to his sources. Inspired by Karl Young's researches at the time of his death, formally constituted in 1946 under the chairmanship of]. Burke Severs, the Chaucer Library's work has been carried forward by Robert A. Pratt, who just recently retired as its Chairman, to be succeeded by Robert E. Lewis, who is also the editor of the first volume of the Chaucer Library series. But there are two earlier volumes that can be related to the series. First, there is Severs' own Literary Relationships ofChaucer's Clerkes Tale (New Haven and London, 1942), which attempted to establish the manuscript tradition of the Griselda story from which Chaucer worked; the volume was initially praised by the reviewers, including Germaine Dempster, who within a 167 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER short time changed her mind, however, and demonstrated that Severs chose the wrong manuscript family on which to base his text(see MP, 40 [1943], 285-88; 41 [1943], 6-16). More recently, Paul M. Clogan published his Medieval Achilleid of Statius (Leiden, 1968), "For 'The Chaucer Library,' "as his dedication page stipulates; Clogan presents his text as that found in a "typical"Liber Catonianus. Although it makes sense that Chaucer could have read the Achilleid in his Cato book, still it is regrettable that theAchilleidwas not published together with the other "typical"contents of that school text. Professor Lewis' volume arrives a decade later, with apparatus as complex and extensive as Severs', yet with only a "typical" text, in the manner of Clogan's. The volume is as handsome and impressive-looking as it is problematic. Now, the ideal for the series was set forth from the beginning: to produce texts of those works Chaucer knew and used in the forms in which he knew and used them. In the Foreword to Lewis' edition Professor· Pratt recalls this ideal: "Glosses and commentaries which accompanied the texts will be presented; even scribal perversions which may explain Chaucer's text will be recorded. . . . Such a faithful reproduction ofChaucer's books as he knew them is ofcourse essential if we are accurately and adequately to understand their influence upon him"(p. ix). In an agreement for publication ratified in December 1970 by the Chaucer Library Committee, the Executive Committee of the Chaucer Group of the MLA, the Executive Council of the MLA, the Executive Committee of the Mediaeval Academy, and the University of Georgia Press, the ideal is stipulated anew: "The Chaucer Library is a series of the classical and medieval works that Chaucer knew, so edited from the medieval manuscripts as to provide texts most nearly like those that Chaucer...

The Illustrated Eighteenth-Century Chaucer

No reader of Blake's illuminated books can ignore the synthetic design of every page: images and words are reciprocal. But when eighteenth-century illustrated books attract critical attention, one or another element is often minimized. Because several hands are involved, the texts are separated from their design and illustration. Thus, Marcia Pointon's study of the history of Milton and English Art passes over the evolution of Milton's text, while in the only recent discussion of the Augustan Chaucer, Alderson and Henderson make no mention at all of the thirty copperplate engravings in their principal text, the Urry edition of 1721.1 Bell's Chaucer of 1782, also fully illustrated, has never to my knowledge been taken into account by critics of Romantic medievalism.2 Like those made for new editions of Paradise Lost and Shakespeare, the forgotten illustrations of the Canterbury Tales are striking elements of the 1721 and 1782 Works, indicative of Chaucer's impact on the eighteenth-century reader and important as visual models or types, to be set against the later Romantic Chaucer pictures of Stothard and Blake at the turn of the century. Examined in context, not dismissed as a minor idiom in the history of art, such illustrations provide evidence of contemporary interpretations of Chaucer's poetry and a cumulative record of revision, in both the artistic styles and themes chosen to portray Chaucer's world. Describing the extraordinary influence of Thomson's Seasons and its pictorial analogs, Ralph Cohen observes, There exist different criteria for the illustration as interpretation and . .. as independent work of art; a 'bad' engraving may still be a valuable commentary upon artistic tradition. [But] the inspiration of one art by another must not be confused with the interpretation of one art by another. 3 Contemporary styles of illustration, typography, and format in eighteenth-century editions of Chaucer's poems reveal several kinds of historical change and afford us a view of incipient Gothic romanticism. The evidence suggests significant shifts: in attitudes toward medieval Chaucer, in the role of the reading public qua buyer-to be attracted as well as instructed-and in the historicism of literary painting, when poetic illustration was becoming increasingly independent of its text. After 1700 there was no one clearly dominant version of Chaucer in print, as had been the case with Thynne's and Speght's editions in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. By the end of the eighteenth century, the Romantics inherited a wealth of Chaucerian excerpts (like Dryden's) in translation,

Reviews

John Gardner, The Poetry of Chaucer, reviewed by Lee W. Patterson Donald R. Howard, The Idea of the Canterbury Tales, reviewed by Lee W. Patterson Robert B. Burlin, Chaucerian Fiction, reviewed by Lee W. Patterson Alfred David, The Strumpet Muse; Art and Morals in Chaucer's Poetry, reviewed by Lee W. Patterson

The Strumpet Muse: Art and Morals in Chaucer’s Poetry by Alfred David

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Davenport to lie in his "sense of concreteness," what critics of the novel tend to call "sense of place," and in his mastery of formal structure, this first, by the way, a very unusual quality in an age where a castle might be at best "strong" and a forest "dark." For example, I do not think I had ever realized how vividly Bertilak's castle was pictured "as a well­ organized, upper-class, Christian household shaping its life according to mass-times, meal-times and bed-times, engaging in suitable occupations, lighting torches when they are needed, cleaning armour and looking after horses properly." And may I add that it is a relief not to have the poet's art discussed in terms of the tortured intricacies of meter and language, the bases of recent studies which, however valuable, do seem to reap scant harvest for the effort expended. But one cannot ever suggest by such cramped summaries either the richness of Davenport's fabric or the skill of its weaving. Indeed the only points at which Davenport can be faulted are those at which his enthusiasm and his anxiousness to communicate as vividly as possible leads him into casting Joan Greenwood as Bertilak's lady and seeing Gawain as a "Wimbledon champion." One can thus recommend Daven­ port's book with very little qualification indeed both to the scholar and more importantly to that singular anomaly, the general student seeking a fresh, perceptive, instructive, and handsomely phrased survey of the works of the Gawain-poet. CHARLES MooRMAN University of Southern Mississippi ALFRED DAvrn, The Strumpet Muse: Art and Morals in Chaucer's Poetry. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1977. Pp. vii, 280. $15. Alfred David's book, The Strumpet Muse: Art and Morals in Chau­ cer's Poetry, is full of the sensitive criticism we have come to expect of its author. At the outset he disclaims a priori theories of what medieval art can and cannot mean. Instead he promises us an exploration of Chaucer's development as a poet,-the early effort to instill in the love vision a philosophic depth, the images of art that take on a life of their own in Troilus and Criseyde, the ironic personae that in The Canter- REVIEWS bury Tales speak through the mouths of the pilgrims. At the same time Chaucer's poetic genius takes him away from the reality he believes in. The art of illusion and the demands of morality turn out to be incom­ patible. The strumpet muse is in the end disavowed. But the proportions of the work are revealing. David does not dwell on the disavowal. Three introductory chapters bring us to The Canterbury Tales. Two final chap­ ters show us the turn from art to spiritual reality. The eleven in between constitute the heart of the book; they reveal what David calls the poet's "Protean being." David sees Chaucer's career as reflecting the "struggle between the moralist who calls for judgment and the artist who refuses to judge" (p. 36). At the same time the poet is sensitive to his position vis a vis his audience. Thus he is both preacher and servant. He stands in a pulpit as in the Corpus manuscript of Troilus and Criseyde, above the royalty and nobility who surround him. He deferentially addresses his patron John of Gaunt in The Book of the Duchess, a humble narrator who must win rather than command attention. These two oppositions, art-morality and preacher-servant, give the book its thematic structure. They form the complex framework for an informed criticism, at ease, knowledge­ able, and sophisticated. This criticism is at its best in the third chapter, entitled "The Paradise of Earthly Love," a consideration in the main of the F (early) Prologue to the Legend of Good Women. The Prologue is seen as not just a super­ ficial palinode to the Troilus. Rather, it goes to the heart of the matter, retracting the epilogue of that work and affirming the permanent validity of what in the Troilus had come through so strongly as the "transient sweetness" (p. 34) of human love. Here...

Friends and Enemies in Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift

Friends and Enemies in Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift JAMES WOOLLEY I “I have been severall months writing near five hundred lines on a pleasant subject, onely to tell what my friends and enemyes will say on me after I am dead.”1 From Swift’s descriptions of Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift in these or very similar words, over and over in his letters, it is evident that (however later critics may have described the poem) when he himself thought of it as a whole, he thought of it as a poem about friendship and enmity, and as a poem about what people would say of him after he died.2 Despite abundant commentary on the poem’s textual history, its structure, genre, irony, vanity, politics, religious lessons, and multiplication of identities, we still have not paid enough attention to the basic question of what it is about. Some discussions, moreover, have insisted too much upon finding Swift an exemplary poet and moralist. But Ronald Paulson, Marshall Waingrow , and David M. Vieth have spoken of friendship as a topic of the Verses; and I propose, without purporting to rescue the poem from the fascinated uneasiness with which we read it, or to explain away its rhetorical flaws, that a fuller recognition of Swift’s strong emphasis on friendship and enmity would correspondingly benefit our understand­ ing of the poem’s intended meaning.3 To that end, I seek to show how the poem emphasizes friendship of a particular kind; then, to illumi205 206 / JAMES WOOLLEY nate a crucial context of the poem in the details of Swift’s actual friendship and enmity with Queen Caroline and Mrs. Howard; and finally, to discuss some implications of this subject for the poem’s most vexed critical problem, which is the interpretation of the concluding eulogy on Swift. That the idea of friendship gives the Verses a loosely defined unity is suggested not only by Swift’s own repeated descriptions of the poem and by its epigraph, but also by the large outlines of its structure. The first of the three main sections, the proem (1—72), states and illus­ trates with some comic irony La Rochefoucauld’s bitter remark that “in the Adversity of our best Friends, we find something that doth not displease us.”4 (More accurately, this section demonstrates the slightly more palatable fact that we envy their good fortune.) The second section (73-298) loosely illustrates the maxim by showing how Swift’s friends will “find their private Ends” in his last illness and death, just as much as his enemies will. The final section (299-484)—the troublesome one—is a monologue, a eulogy on Swift, delivered by neither a friend nor an enemy but, we are told, a neutral—“one quite indiff’rent in the Cause” (305). Swift’s point is that he cannot expect the praise he deserves from a friend: the eulogy thus wittily and ironi­ cally underscores the statement about friendship made in the first two sections. The emphasis on friendship is further visible in the sheer number of times friend, friendship, and related words appear. The importance of the idea, not merely in this poem but in Swift’s verse as a whole, is suggested by the statistic that friend and related words appear more frequently in Swift’s verse than any other noun—a distinction Swift’s verse shares, to some degree, with Pope’s. By contrast, Josephine Miles has shown, friend is not among even the ten most recurrent nouns in the poetry of Chaucer, Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Donne, Her­ bert, Milton, Collins, Gray, Bums, Cowper, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Tennyson, Browning, Poe, Emerson, or Housman.5 Not all critics have observed the natural connection between friendship and the poem’s other main topic, Swift’s death. Swift is drawing upon a traditional expectation that a friend will speak in one’s favor when one cannot with tact and propriety do so oneself, and will Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift / 207 preserve one’s memory when the time comes.6 Friendship has indeed been seen as one of the few hedges against mutability which...

Troilus and Criseyde: A Facsimile of Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS. 61 by M. B. Parkes, Elizabeth Salter

REVIEWS One of the most refreshing features of Medieval Eloquence is the gen­ erosity with which its authors point the way to future work in a vineyard that seems still very lush.Faulhaber (p.85) notes "the absence of editions of key works" by the dictatores. Parkes (p.139) suggests that "the key to the understanding of medieval punctuation lies . . . in the concern of the scribe or corrector to elucidate the text transmitted to him according to the needs of his own audience....This hypothesis is offered tentatively to stimulate further, more detailed investigations of the practices of in­ dividual scribes and correctors in medieval manuscripts." Jackson J. Campbell (p.197) reports that "careful study of Old English literature from the point of view of classical rhetoric has little more than begun." Aldo Scaglione (p.269) concludes his essay by observing that "Dante's style, both Latin and vernacular, both in prose and verse, still remains largely unexplored...." And Robert 0.Payne (p.271) offers an explora­ tion of Chaucer's poetry that "may open some new possibilities for future work on Chaucer and the rhetoricians." This is, altogether, an excellent volume. It will enjoy good company with Professor Murphy's Rhetoric in the Middle Ages: A History of Rhetorical Theory from Saint Augustine to the Renaissance and his edition of Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts. RrcHARD L. HoFFMAN Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University M. B. PARKES and ELIZABETH SALTER, introd. , Troilus and Criseyde: A Facsimile of Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS. 61. Cambri�ge: D.S.Brewer, Ltd., 1978. Pp.xxiv, 302. £65. Chaucerians can only welcome with enthusiasm and gratitude this handsome facsimile of one of the three pre-eminent mss of the Troilus and Criseyde. Corpus Christi College Cambridge MS. 61 is of interest not only because it provides the text (a gamma, according to Root's classification) upon which most editions, whether rightly or wrongly, have been based, and because it boasts one of the most handsome and famous frontispieces in medieval literature, but because it is a splendid example of late medieval book-making which is frozen, as it were, after most of the preparation had been completed but before the finishing, STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER except for the frontispiece, had been done. With the projected facsimiles of the Campsall (Pierpont Morgan Library MS. M. 817) and the St. John's College Cambridge MSS. of Troilus which are to be produced in the course of the Variorum Chaucer, scholars will be in an entirely new and highly advantageous position in their studies of the text of the great­ est of Chaucer's poems. D. S. Brewer, Ltd., and the Scalar Press are to be congratulated for their achievement by which a valuable ms is well photographed and the facsimile clearly produced, and the book provided for a scholarly audience at a reasonable price. Had Corpus Christi 6r been finished, it would probably have surpassed the Ellesmere in its overall beauty and lavishness (the frontispiece is, of course, far superior to any single piece of work in Ellesmere). As it was left, it presents a strange appearance, with its glowing frontispiece followed by colorlessness, except for the red incipits and explicits at book divisions. The two scribalhands are solidly professional and legible, their littera quadrata so precise a textura as to make even the hair-line strokes nearly always clearly visible in the photographs. The hands are in harmony, differing primarily in size, the second hand being smaller and rather more square than the first, in which the bulk of the poem is written. Legibility suffers, for readers of the facsimile, only occasionally when the scribe is writing on the hair side of the membrane and the fine strokes get lost in the rough surface. The unfinished state of the ms raises a number of interesting questions which are discussed by M. B. Parkes in his section of the introduction. Parkes' introduction is valuable, in no small part due to the fact that his has been among the most important work in recent paleographical an­ alysis and classification. Parkes and A. I. Doyle have, in recent years, been the most active scholars in investigating...

The Strumpet Muse: Art and Morals in Chaucer's Poetry. Alfred David

<i>The Strumpet Muse: Art and Morals in Chaucer's Poetry</i>. Alfred David

The Poetry of Chaucer

The Poetry of Chaucer

Rymyng Craftily: Meaning in Chaucer's Poetry

Rymyng Craftily: Meaning in Chaucer's Poetry

The Language of Chaucer's Poetry: An Appraisal of the Verse, Style and Structure

The Language of Chaucer's Poetry: An Appraisal of the Verse, Style and Structure

Reviews and Comment

Book reviewed in this article:The Shires. Routledge &amp; Kegan Paul,Love or Nothing. Faber,The Way In. Oxford University Press,The Scenic Route. Oxford University Press,Rymyng Craftily: Meaning in Chaucer's Poetry. By Stephen Knight.The Poetry of John Clare. A Critical Introduction. By Mark Storey.The Pattern of Maughum. By Anthony Curtis.The Road From Paris. By Cyrena N. Pondrom.Bernard Shaw and The Art Of Drama. By Charles A. Berst.

The Language of Chaucer's Poetry: An Appraisal of the Verse, Style, and Structure. Norman E. Eliason

<i>The Language of Chaucer's Poetry: An Appraisal of the Verse, Style, and Structure</i>. Norman E. Eliason

Genres and Themes: A Reaction to Two Views of ChaucerThe Language of Chaucer's Poetry: An Appraisal of Verse, Style and Structure. Norman E. EliasonDisembodied Laughter: "Troilus" and the Apotheosis Tradition. John M. Steadman

Previous articleNext article No AccessReview ArticleGenres and Themes: A Reaction to Two Views of Chaucer The Language of Chaucer's Poetry: An Appraisal of Verse, Style and Structure. Norman E. Eliason Disembodied Laughter: "Troilus" and the Apotheosis Tradition. John M. Steadman Theodore A. StroudTheodore A. Stroud Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Modern Philology Volume 72, Number 1Aug., 1974 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/390536 Copyright 1974 The University of ChicagoPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.