House Of Fame Research Articles

“Piers Plowman” and the Poetics of Enigma: Riddles, Rhetoric, and Theology. Curtis A. Gruenler. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017. Pp. xii+586.

<i>“Piers Plowman” and the Poetics of Enigma: Riddles, Rhetoric, and Theology</i>. Curtis A. Gruenler. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2017. Pp. xii+586.

Chaucer: Visual Approaches ed. by Susanna Fein and David Raybin

Reviewed by: Chaucer: Visual Approaches ed. by Susanna Fein and David Raybin Nancy Mason Bradbury Susanna Fein and David Raybin, eds. Chaucer: Visual Approaches. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016. Pp. xxiv, 302. $69.95 cloth; $34.95 paper. Scholars of Middle English literature have reasons already to be grateful to Susanna Fein and David Raybin, and the splendid co-edited volume reviewed here adds yet another. Initiating collaborative projects, minding gaps in the scholarship of our field, fostering community: their contribution extends well beyond co-editing Chaucer Review, the journal whose fiftieth anniversary this handsome book celebrates. Chaucer: Visual Approaches offers a wealth of images, fresh ways to think about them, and fruitful exploration of their many implications for reading Chaucer. The current digitally assisted renaissance in manuscript studies and recent advances, theoretical and practical, in the larger study of the material book have led to deeper and more ambitious investigations into premodern reading practices, an inquiry to which the essays in this volume contribute. Building on an indispensable foundation of earlier research into manuscript production and ownership, scholars have begun to ask more searching questions about what exactly late medieval [End Page 361] readers did with their texts. How did they read? What imaginative associations did they make between words on a page and the contexts they brought to their reading, including their experience of images? How did aspects of page design condition their responses? Such questions call for the kinds of deeply researched, cross-disciplinary scholarship so generously on offer in this collection. Part 1, "Ways of Seeing," begins with Ashby Kinch's "Intervisual Texts, Intertextual Images: Chaucer and the Luttrell Psalter." Using the example of two distinguished scholars, a literary critic and an art historian, who draw upon the Luttrell Psalter in studies of lasting value, Kinch argues that each one nevertheless falls short of a methodology in which image and text stand as aesthetic equals. Bringing the two together into a reciprocal relationship in which neither is reduced to "static cultural evidence," "free of mediating context," will require "new reading procedures," including attention to intervisuality, a counterpart of intertextuality meant to encourage the reading of images with the same awareness of context, mediation, multiple meanings, and other sources of complexity we bring to reading texts such as Chaucer's (4, 12, 20). Kinch's is only one of many ambitious goals to emerge from this volume, and the full reciprocity for which he calls need not govern all visual approaches, but this opening essay sets a laudably high bar for cross-disciplinary work: the editors call it "bracing" (xvii). Two essays in Part 1, Alexandra Cook's "Creative Memory and Visual Image in Chaucer's House of Fame" and Kathryn Vulić's "The Vernon Paternoster Diagram, Medieval Graphic Design, and the Parson's Tale," bring consideration of the visual to the project of mapping premodern reading practices. Both explore spatial models, one virtual and one material, for navigating, interpreting, and remembering texts. Cook's essay tracks Chaucer's thematization in The House of Fame of the artificial memory system taught by scholars such as John of Garland, showing how Chaucer's poem draws upon the imagined places of memory systems as a means of literary invention as well as a way of recalling the ancient past. Vulić seeks to fill in a lacuna in The Parson's Tale, the narrator's deflection of an exposition of the Paternoster to "maistres of theologie," by close-reading a wonderfully intricate diagram that explicates the prayer's contents and theological connections; her aim is to show "how images can facilitate the sort of devotional work the Parson's text advocates" (62). Between the two, Sarah Stanbury's "'Quy la?': The Counting-House, the Shipman's Tale, and Architectural Interiors" carries [End Page 362] forward her groundbreaking work on materiality and domestic spaces in Chaucer, here focused on the counting-house as a relatively new interior space, a choice of setting that offers "a metacommentary on changing spatial and social practices of bourgeois life" (41). A final section reads Chaucer's counting-house against a rich array of contemporary paintings in which architectural cutaways...

Les antiquités concurrentes dans la transmission du mythe troyen dans l'Angleterre médiévale tardive: la Maison de la Renommée de Geoffrey Chaucer et le Viol de Lucrèce de William Shakespeare

Compared to the continent, the matter of Troy features relatively late in vernacular English literature. In fourteenth-century Britain, we argue, Troy becomes a privileged site for poetological investigations into the nature of literary and historiographical innovation. Troy assumes this role in insular narratives because of a complex dynamics of literary tradition and innovation already present in the older Troy traditions. Fourteenth-century writers use Troy to construct and question a panorama of competing antiquities –a panorama which sustains a sense of literary competition that foregrounds the construction of temporalities, especially the relationship of "old" and "new". Using Bruno Latour's concept of temporal hybridity, we claim further that Troy continues to be a central discourse to raise meta-poetic questions until well into the sixteenth century. We demonstrate this by readings of Geoffrey Chaucer's House of Fame and William Shakespeare's Rape of Lucrece. We read Chaucer's Fame as a productive confrontation of literary tradition insofar as the poem questions seemingly authoritative knowledge regarding the Trojan War. The poem offers an epistemological legitimization of a poetics of innovation that remains productive at least until the Renaissance. Shakespeare's Lucrece, for example, is highly traditional, that is, late medieval, in the way it uses Trojan topoi to comment on the relationship of originality and tradition. The poem's Trojan ekphrasis, we argue, demonstrates the complex interactions of different temporalities, as it engages with classical as well as medieval intertexts, especially Chaucer's Fame.

Blanche, Two Chaucers and the Stanley Family

The textual history of The Book of the Duchess challenges many spurious traditions encouraged by the apparently disordered state of Chaucer’s texts on his death. The lack of contemporary references casts doubt on whether the poem was circulated in the fourteenth century or commissioned by John of Gaunt as an elegy for his wife. The first witnesses, in three mid-fifteenth-century manuscripts, contain substantial lacunae, ‘resolved’ in Thynne’s printed edition of 1532. This article examines Bodleian MS Fairfax 16, which bears the arms of John Stanley of Hooton, a leading court functionary from a rising family. It argues that the selection of texts in that MS reflects Stanley’s contact with a cultural milieu centred on the Duke of Suffolk, while the inclusion of The Book of the Duchess and The House of Fame may result from Suffolk’s wife Alice Chaucer making available material from her grandfather’s personal papers.

The Poetic Form of Voice in Chaucer's House of Fame

Abstract The House of Fame has long frustrated efforts to make sense of its apparent incompleteness. This article redirects attention from the end of the poem to the relatively overlooked middle, exploring how the vision of the primal scene offered in the second book of the poem is significantly complicated by the formal feature of recurring, inverted rhyme pairs, or “circle rhymes,” which recapitulate the revolutionary theory of poetic form and voice articulated in the vision.

Chaucer the Alchemist: Physics, Mutability, and the Medieval Imagination by Alexander N. Gabrovsky

Reviewed by: Chaucer the Alchemist: Physics, Mutability, and the Medieval Imagination by Alexander N. Gabrovsky Joe Stadolnik Alexander N. Gabrovsky. Chaucer the Alchemist: Physics, Mutability, and the Medieval Imagination Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015. Pp. xix, 291. $119.99 cloth; $89.00 e-book. In Chaucer the Alchemist, Alexander N. Gabrovsky proposes to read Chaucer's poetry for the ways he "exploits the scientific thinking of his day in order to conceptualize and aestheticize his own unique philosophy of physics," and more broadly, of worldly change and mutability. Chaucer is cast as a perceptive observer of a world ever in motion and ever in flux; these natural-scientific interests encouraged him to study up on physics, alchemy, and logic, and then to translate this learning into a [End Page 469] number of his poems as narrative programs or interpretive keys. Gabrovsky praisingly calls these poems "thought experiments," and so described, these texts are made to exemplify Chaucer's genius as both literary maker and natural philosopher. Chaucer the Alchemist invites readers, in its title and in its arguments, to reimagine his poetry as the thoughtful, methodical reworking of elemental subject matter: contemporary medieval philosophies of the mutable, the transforming, and the contingent. An introduction argues that references to physical transformation across Chaucer's poetry together reflect that captivation by worldly change. Gabrovsky here provides a survey of "clerical cultures" that may have served as conduits of learning to medieval society broadly and Chaucer's London milieu specifically: namely the mendicant orders and medieval universities; he also places his arguments within the scholarship on Chaucer and medieval science. Four chapters then focus upon one poem matched with a series of academic concepts or modes of thinking. Gabrovsky argues that The House of Fame follows a "philosophical formula for [its] action" (29) as a "product of fourteenth-century debates on the science of mechanics" (28). Two subsequent chapters scour The Franklin's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde for "a network of alchemical imagery" that "guides Chaucer's whole narrative project" in each (189). The fifth chapter understands the avian debate of the Parliament of Fowls to be a logical exercise in conditionals and possibilities, written expertly after a Scholastic pattern of ars obligitoria. A conclusion suggests that the monadic and dyadic concepts of Neoplatonist thought offered Chaucer another way to think abstractly about change, and to write about it. Gabrovsky deserves praise for how Chaucer the Alchemist assembles anew a set of natural-scientific texts and ideas from the corners of medieval intellectual culture for a generalist Chaucerian readership. For instance, his chapter on The Franklin's Tale highlights an alchemical discourse of astrological and sexual conjunction with reference to the Latin Epistola solis ad lunam crescentem. This is the "book Senior" of the Canon's Yeoman's reading list, translated from the Arabic of Muhammad ibn Umail. The mingling of the astrological with the alchemical in the Epistola serves well to warrant Gabrovsky's claim that the zodiacal preoccupations of the learned "philosopher" of Orléans and his client Aurelius chimed with a cognate alchemical allegory, the wedding of sun and moon. Passages from the Epistola and texts such as Albertus Magnus's Liber mineralibus and the De compositione alchimiae of Morienus illuminate [End Page 470] how alchemical theory might underwrite an interpretation of the physical and psychological transformations wrought by the tale's narrative. Gabrovsky grounds another tidy claim for Chaucer's poetic adaptation of physical concepts on solid, convincing ground in his chapter on The House of Fame. Geffrey's changing sense of the wicker labyrinth's motion—whirling from without and "stente" from within—presents readers with a problem of relative perception and, more broadly, worldly and celestial mechanics. Gabrovsky tracks how such questions were taken up in Aristotle's De caelo and Aquinas's commentary upon it, as well as via figures of thought such as John Buridan and Nicole Oresme's example of the observer on a moving ship. When Geffrey claims to "know where he stands" with confidence, to his readers he appears to stand unsteadily and with uncertain shiftiness in the chaotic, spinning world of the poem. At a few points like these...

Chaucer’s House of Fame and Its Boccaccian Intertexts: Image, Vision, and the Vernacular. Katherine McKinley. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2016. Pp. xvi+228.

Chaucer’s House of Fame and Its Boccaccian Intertexts: Image, Vision, and the Vernacular. Katherine McKinley. Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, 2016. Pp. xvi+228.

Chaucer's Return from Lombardy, the Shrine of St. Leonard at Hythe, and the “corseynt Leonard” in the House of Fame, Lines 112–18

Abstract Chaucer's reference to Saint Leonard in the House of Fame, lines 112–18, has been glossed as a humorous jest on the difficulty of marriage since the time of Skeat. This article reinterprets these lines in light of comparative textual analysis, the historical context of the cult of Saint Leonard, and the geographical context of Chaucer's travel from Lombardy in 1378. It finds that Chaucer likely passed through the port of Hythe, Kent, there visiting the Church of St. Leonard, where he would have encountered its marvelous “Eolus scepter” as part of the local maritime cult of Saint Leonard.

Ripples on the Water?: The Acoustics of Geoffrey Chaucer's House of Fame and the Influence of Robert Holcot

Focusing on the Eagle's discussion of the principles of acoustics in lines 729–822 of The House of Fame, this essay offers a reconsideration of the nature of Chaucer's engagement with fourteenth-century physics. In particular, it offers a new interpretation of the sources for the Eagle's explanation of the mechanisms of sound in terms of an analogy with the ripples on the surface of a body of water. This passage is typically seen as an illustration of the extent to which Chaucer's thinking on natural science is highly traditional, wholly shaped by such venerable authorities as Aristotle, Macrobius, Boethius, and Vincent of Beauvais; but here it is argued that Chaucer was probably most directly influenced at this point in The House of Fame by a passage in the widely circulated Wisdom-commentary of the Dominican friar Robert Holcot (d. 1349). Even if Chaucer is unlikely to have been familiar with "cutting-edge" thinkers such as Robert Grosseteste (d. 1253), Walter Burley (d. 1344 or after), and the Oxford Calculators, Holcot himself certainly had direct access to the work of all of them. Perhaps more significantly, he may well have shown Chaucer how specifically "scientific" motifs could be turned to literary effect even in contexts that are otherwise predominantly moral and/or allegorical.

Geoffrey Chaucer: A New Introduction by David Wallace

Reviewed by: Geoffrey Chaucer: A New Introduction by David Wallace Megan E. Murton David Wallace. Geoffrey Chaucer: A New Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017. Pp. xiv, 172. $19.95. David Wallace's Geoffrey Chaucer: A New Introduction lives up to its name in inviting its readers to look anew at Chaucer, seeing in him not the founding father of English letters but "the poet of an unfinished Englishness" (142). Wallace shows how Chaucer's Middle English absorbs influences ranging from scientific treatises to "urban noise" (44) to become a capacious and flexible poetic medium. The experimental quality of Chaucer's language is, Wallace proposes, a reason why his works are enjoying a far-reaching appeal now, in a world where English has become dominant. Wallace's dual focus on language and global reception makes his book a thought-provoking read that not only introduces its audience to Chaucer's writings but also demonstrates their present-day significance and vitality. The introductory chapter, "Beginnings," covers both theoretical and contextual ground. It opens with a discussion of audience and persona, concepts Wallace presents as integral to Chaucer's art and to current criticism of it. The chapter then shifts, via Terry Eagleton's description of Chaucer as a "class traitor" (10), to an overview of the poet's life and times. The thesis here is that Chaucer was "first and foremost a European" (12), a claim that Wallace, of all Chaucerians, is ideally suited to expound and defend. He first makes a compelling and admirably condensed case for Chaucer's continental focus, and then vindicates the cosmopolitanism of the Middle Ages more broadly. The chapter ends with a section on war as the dark underside of the interconnected medieval world. Insightful references to Chaucer's writings are sprinkled throughout the introductory chapter, but more developed readings begin in the second, "Schoolrooms, Science, Female Intuition." This is one of two thematic chapters that bracket a more or less chronological tour of Chaucer's writings in the book's middle three chapters. This structure is complex but effective, as it allows Wallace to trace both Chaucer's recurrent engagement with certain topics and his trajectory of development as a poet. The second chapter examines Chaucer's interest in ways of knowing. After a brief overview of Scholasticism and exegesis, Wallace describes Chaucer's scientific expertise and his readiness to make fun of it; The [End Page 387] House of Fame, for instance, is "perched somewhere between science and farce" (33). The chapter then pivots to the relationship between women and Latinate intellectual culture, introducing the Wife of Bath as "a tissue of … anti-feminist texts" (36) and then, in the space of a few pages, examining gendered presentations of knowledge in The Nun's Priest's Tale, The Second Nun's Tale, The Merchant's Tale, Troilus and Criseyde, and The House of Fame, with references to As You Like It and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight along the way. This section is typical of the book as a whole in the expert way in which it charts a path through Chaucer's writings while referencing other medieval poems and later works of English literature. The chapter concludes with the claim that, for Chaucer, "women are different" (42) in a specifically epistemological sense. Readers who are familiar with Chaucer criticism will appreciate this chapter's illuminating perspective on his treatment of gender. The third chapter, "A Life in Poetry," begins the chronological section of the book. Living in a world where "'English poetry' was a contradiction in terms," Chaucer "aspires to" this label in his early works (43). The chapter examines how this aspiration leads Chaucer to learn from French models and then Italian ones, though Wallace cautions that French and Italian do not represent fully distinct creative phases. The core of the chapter discusses Machaut alongside The Book of the Duchess and Dante alongside The House of Fame. The conclusion focuses on The Parliament of Fowls as a case study in Chaucer's response to Italian metrics, which Wallace describes as a "liberatory" influence that may have led Chaucer to invent rhyme royal (57). Rhyme royal provides a transition...

Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy by Kellie Robertson

Reviewed by: Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy by Kellie Robertson Taylor Cowdery Kellie Robertson. Nature Speaks: Medieval Literature and Aristotelian Philosophy. The Middle Ages Series, ed. Ruth Mazo Karras. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Pp. x, 446, 10 illus. $69.95. A. O. Lovejoy once wrote that the task of the historian of ideas is to "trace connectedly" the "working of a given conception, of an explicit or tacit presupposition, of a type of mental habit, or of a specific thesis or argument" across a range of discourses and historical periods—all in the attempt to "put gates through the fences" that separate these discourses and periods from each other.7 In Nature Speaks, Kellie Robertson has given medievalists an ambitious and often dazzling work of premodern intellectual history cast in precisely this mold. Over the course of eight chapters, Robertson broadly outlines different models of nature in both contemporary theory and medieval literature and philosophy by [End Page 378] tracking the fortunes of a single idea. This is the Aristotelian concept of inclinatio, or "inclination," which sought to explain how and why each natural creature was inclined, both temporally and physically, toward a certain end. As Robertson observes, inclinatio was a hot topic in both philosophy and poetry during the Middle Ages, because its power to explain certain human behaviors (such as sexual desire) often ran at cross purposes to certain orthodoxies in medieval Christianity (such as the freedom of the human will). By telling the story of inclinatio from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, Robertson casts valuable light on the way that medieval culture thought about humanity's place in nature. In the process, she also makes a persuasive case for why scholars of medieval literature ought to pay better attention to natural philosophy, which both poets and philosophers inevitably drew upon whenever they sought, as she puts it, "to transform the world into words" (1). Nature Speaks begins with three chapters that lay out its theoretical stakes and introduce two broad claims that recur through the book. The first claim is that there were two primary models for nature during the Middle Ages: "a 'transcendent' one, associated with Neoplatonic and Augustinian writers who saw nature as inscrutable and to varying degrees detached from the human world, and an 'immanent' one, associated with Aristotelian and Thomist writers who believed that the regular teleological processes observable in nature could not only reveal aspects of the divine plan but also teach us something about ourselves" (3). The second is that this dichotomy makes itself particularly felt in debates over the influence of inclinatio upon the will during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries—something that Robertson demonstrates with a deft reading of the role that "kyndely enclyning" plays in Chaucer's House of Fame. Chapters 1 ("Figuring Physis") and 2 ("Aristotle's Nature") prosecute both of these claims in greater depth, by considering how nature was conceptualized, figured, and debated by both Augustinians and Aristotelians during the twelfth, thirteenth, and fourteenth centuries. Chapter 1 focuses mostly on four common figurations of Nature and her activity (ladder, book, artisan, or ax) in a wide range of texts including Gautier de Metz's L'image du monde, the Prick of Conscience, and Bartholomeus Anglicus's De proprietatibus rerum. Chapter 2 assesses the significance of a key event: Bishop Etienne Tempier's 1277 condemnation, at the University of Paris, of more than 219 propositions that pertained to Aristotelian natural philosophy. Robertson argues [End Page 379] that, while the 1277 condemnation was broadly concerned with epistemology in general and "the limits of natural reason" (93), it also interrogated the particular legacy of Aristotle himself—a legacy that was often debated, as she observes, in accounts of whether or not the philosopher died a Christian death. By reading various accounts of Aristotle's end, such as the spurious De pomo, or select passages in Ranulph Higden's Polychronicon, Robertson makes it clear that the epistemological value of Aristotle's thought was hardly a settled matter during the fourteenth century. With this theoretical groundwork laid, Robertson next turns her attention to literary representations of Nature in the work of four late...

Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention by Steele Nowlin

Reviewed by: Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention by Steele Nowlin Jeffery G. Stoyanoff Steele Nowlin. Chaucer, Gower, and the Affect of Invention. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2016. Pp. 234. $99.95. Steele Nowlin's discussion of invention through a reconceptualization of affect is a groundbreaking study that marks a shift in our understanding of and approach to two of the most important authors in Middle English: Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower. Nowlin examines how Chaucer and Gower "present invention as an affective force, a process characterized by emergence and potentiality" (1). Nowlin's affect is not one of emotion. It is "an intensity … typically described in a critical vocabulary of movement, emergence, and becoming" (1). He also [End Page 374] broadens the definition of invention to one "that includes the dynamism and sense of potential that characterize inventional activity" (2). He clearly illustrates this relationship between affect and invention with an analysis of two cases of "paralyzed dreaming narrators": in Chaucer's The Parliament of Fowls and Gower's Vox clamantis (2). In both cases, the narrators' emotions manifest themselves in actions that lead to the creation of poetry: what Nowlin calls "the affect of invention" (12). In the remainder of the introduction, Nowlin provides an excellent overview of the scholarship on both invention and affect in medieval studies. His discussion of affect theory (13–17) explains his own contribution to this discourse within medieval studies as well as how he brings this contribution to bear on the idea of invention (17–18). In so doing, Nowlin deftly addresses a number of primary and secondary texts on invention in medieval studies (18–28). He concludes the introduction by coming back to Chaucer and Gower, again reiterating that "examining the ways in which aesthetic productions emerge through processes of invention… creates ways in which poetry can intervene in the discursive constructions of reality that exist outside of poetic worlds" (28). Whether or not intentional, Nowlin's chapters each follow this emergent process, which he argues is vital to the works of Chaucer and Gower, with each chapter stemming from the affect of the prior. In Chapter 1, Nowlin explores the conceit of invention as movement in Chaucer's House of Fame. Nowlin emphasizes the abundance of movement in the proem to Book I, noting that it is "the primary conceptual framework" within the poem that sets the stage for its "examination of invention as movement" (40). He directs our attention to how the proem presents "dreams as affective forces" (40) and adds that the movement produced from these forces essentially displaces feeling. He marks the poem's emphasis on "engynes and gynnynges" as thought before likening "tydynges" as depicted in Book III's House of Rumor to images in the imagination (42–43). Referring to Chaucer's "motional quality of imagination" (43), Nowlin then demonstrates that tydynges are actually "inventional gynnynges" (50). The meticulousness with which Nowlin presents this argument, marrying the theoretical so well with the textual apparatus that Chaucer employs, is admirable. The analysis he provides of Book III to demonstrate invention as "a process of moving and becoming" is delightful (55), particularly his discussion of the eagle's speech (56–58), which adds an impressive and ultimately more productive interpretation of this moment in the poem to the existing readings. [End Page 375] Towards the end of the chapter, Nowlin discusses the poem's treatment of Dido as a potential inventor, which results in Geffrey appropriating her invention as his own, participating in the "misogynistic trope of masculinist invention" (68). Chapter 2 emerges from this unresolved question of gender and invention left at the end of Chapter 1. "The Legend of Good Women," contends Nowlin, "… actively work[s] to trigger in readers a sudden awareness of the pervasiveness of cultural constructions of gender and power" (69). He calls Legend "Chaucer's fullest narrative treatise on the affect of invention" and asserts it is an effort "to destabilize the antifeminist literary and cultural traditions its narratives would seem to represent" (73). Nowlin points out the impossibility for any poem to represent the affect of invention directly in a...

Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems by A.J. Minnis, V.J. Scattergood and J. J. Smith

REVIEWS A.J. MINNIS with V.J. SCATTERGOOD and J. J. SMITH. Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. xiv, 578. $72.00. Compared to its predecessors (Helen Cooper, The Canterbury Tales (1989}; Barry Windeatt, Troilus andCriseyde (1992}), this third and last volume of the Oxford Guides to Chaucer (OGC) is heftier (578 pages, vs. 437 for the Tales and 414 for the Troilus), and, more significantly, it brings the series very much into the 1990s in critical style as well as date. A. J. Minnis's discussions of The Book ofthe Duchess (BD), The House ofFame(HF), The Parliament ofFowls (PF), and The LegendofGood Women (LGW) adopt a personal, often tendentious voice and undertake to en­ gage aggressively many of the critical issues and perspectives that have entered, and to a great extent transformed, Chaucer criticism during the last 20 years. (By contrast, the appended survey of the lyrics by V. J. Scattergood does not overtly manifest Minnis's concern "to consider the ideological implications of various readings" of Chaucer's poetry [p. 1}.) Responding positively (if not without some ambivalence) to the evo­ lution of the "New Historicism," Minnis offers his "readings of Chaucer's love-visions within an anthropology of courtly didacticism and play and as inscriptions of aristocratic ideals of conduct and processes of cultural fashioning" (p. 4), while resisting the notion that Chaucer is to be understood exclusively "as occupying the position of sophisticated princepleaser"-an understanding that runs counter to Minnis's "identifications of certain prospects of dissidence in Chaucerian fiction," specifically with respect to "aristocratic mores, tra­ ditional misogyny, [or} authoritarian literary theory" (p. 5). Overall, Minnis rejects attempts to read the dream-poems in ways that he regards as anachronistic or overly generalized. He has no pa­ tience with the Robertsonian, allegorizing school (Chaucer, to him, is clearly a secular poet who avoids opportunities to allegorize, as when he borrows details for his version of the Ceyx and Alcyone story in BD from the Ovide moralise, but avoids its moralitas). And in at least partial op­ position to feminist critiques of the representation of women in the dream poems, he aims at "a historicized gender criticism which at­ tempts to respect the room for dissent which the culture of Chaucer's day allowed, in so far as that can be recuperated by recourse to such ev­ idence as is available to us" (p. 5). (To this end, Minnis distinguishes between the "structural antifeminism" of late medieval European civi­ lization, by which Chaucer could not avoid being somewhat affected, 275 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER and "phobic antifeminism," that special animosity most characteristic of clerics, from which he largely absolves the poet [see pp.427-32}.) Two introductory chapters locate the dream-poems with respect to vernacular literary traditions and the social ideologies of Chaucer's au­ dience."The Shorter Poems: Social and Cultural Contexts" offers an ex­ cellent summary of recent theorizing about Chaucer's social and profes­ sional placement and its impact on his poetic development. Minnis argues for the crucial influence of the "international [i. e. , French-based} court culture," promoted by Edward III and Richard II, both on Chaucer's poetic formation and on the "receptive company of courtiers who shared an interest in poetry and a highly personal and earnest piety" (p.19)-the so-called "Lollard Knights" who collectively estab­ lish a "horizontal axis [on which} may be sought the audience of Chaucer's courtly poetry" (p.22 ). "Chaucer and the Love-Vision Form" first examines the ambiguous, often indeterminate dream taxonomies of Chaucer's heritage and demonstrates how his dream-poems reproduce and exploit the ambigu­ ities of significance and interpretation associated with dreams.In the second part of this chapter, dedicated to the analogously complex issue of fin' amors, Minnis considers "the implications of the conventions of courtly love for the construction of gender" (p.60).Responding to the spate of recent analyses-singled out are those of R. Howard Bloch, Maud Ellmann, and Elaine Tuttle Hansen-that depict courtly love as a "patriarchal conspiracy" (p.67), Minnis argues that such judgments, while obviously valid in part, ultimately constitute...

With ‘Name in Honde’

M acrobiusmakesacuriousremark in Book V, chapter 13 of the Saturnalia when he compares a Homeric personification with its imitation by Virgil. Homer’s Strife ( Eris ) and Virgil’s Fama both start small but soon grow huge, their heads touching the heavens with their feet still on the ground. Macrobius says that this is fitting enough for Strife, since contention is contention no matter how large it grows. Virgil, though, has dropped the ball: when a rumour grows so big, he says, it ceases to be a rumour and instead becomes the consciousness of a known fact. 1 It is a neat observation: could that be said to be a rumour which is everywhere known? The sphere of fama is one where knowledge and the word can get into some interesting knots, a world where seeming is sometimes so close to being as to be identifiable with it. ‘Hyt is not al gold that glareth’ (l. 272), as we read in The House of Fame , where Chaucer seems alive to the fact that, at times and with enough glare, who is to say?

Chaucer’s (Anti-)Eroticisms and the Queer Middle Ages by Tison Pugh

Reviewed by: Chaucer’s (Anti-)Eroticisms and the Queer Middle Agesby Tison Pugh Kathryn L. Lynch tison pugh, Chaucer’s (Anti-)Eroticisms and the Queer Middle Ages. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture. Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press, 2014. Pp. 242. isbn: 978–0–8142–1264–6. $64.95 (cloth). isbn: 978–0–8142–7319–7. $64.95 (ebook). isbn: 978–0–8142–9368–3. $14.95 (CD). Chaucer’s mastery of bawdy humor did not prevent his poetry from also reaching heights of transcendent romantic lyricism and devotional poignancy, and Chaucer criticism is not lacking in analysis of either register. Tison Pugh, however, brings something new to the mix by identifying ‘anti-eroticism’ as the ground that brings meaning and sharpness to the poet’s representations of carnal exchange and physical love; erotic and ‘anti-erotic’ become categories that are intertwined rather than opposites. After an introduction that lays out the framework of this anti-erotic ‘queering’ of Chaucer’s oeuvre, Pugh turns in chapter two to the impossibility of Dorigen’s role as courtly beloved in the Franklin’s Tale. Not only is her presence mostly gratuitous, designed to enable a homosocial rivalry between Aurelius and Arveragus, but also, fulfillment in this tale is masochistic, inhabiting places of sacrifice rather than of success. In the end, the climax of the story becomes a set of affairs that do not take place and whose pleasures are deeply ‘anti-erotic.’ In chapter three, Pugh turns to the possibility of male friendship as confirmed through oaths of brotherhood in five disparate narratives: The House of Fame, the Knight’s Tale, the Friar’s Tale, the Pardoner’s Tale, and the Shipman’s Tale. The male/male relationships pledged through these oaths bear clear homoerotic potential, but they are ‘queer’ in other ways as well. For example, to the extent that Palamon and Arcite honor chivalric brotherhood, they are cut off from heterosexual love and marriage. In tales told by and about the lower classes, oaths of brotherhood also underscore the empty social pretensions of Chaucer’s churls. In all cases, brotherhood promises are never powerful enough to contain the unruly libidinal energies that animate them, and they frequently devolve into blatant hypocrisy. Chapter four explores the ‘necrotic erotics in Chaucerian romance’ in the Knight’s Taleand Troilus and Criseyde. The pursuit of a woman like Emelye or Criseyde who has no interest in hetero-erotic love amounts to a courtship [End Page 148]of one’s own death. Indeed, death-like imagery haunts the women in these stories, who are conquered or traded in war and reject productive childbearing, as well as the men, who experience falling in love as a kind of painful death, foreshadowing the actual deaths of male lovers in both poems. But children themselves do not guarantee survival or defeat death, as we learn in chapter five. Families with children are also ‘queered,’ by the iron hand of paternal authority. In a comic register, the Miller Symkyn (in the Reeve’s Tale) trades his erotic interest in his wife and his parental concern for his daughter for money and social status. A similar displacement of erotic and affective value also governs the Summoner’s Tale, where the fact of a dead child proves no match for the Friar’s discourtesy and implacable need to press forward into the ailing Thomas’ queered anal ‘pryvetee.’ Children are reduced to pawns of maternal torture and child abduction in the Clerk’s Tale, and in the Physician’s Taleof Virginia, a father’s need to preserve his paternal honor causes him to sacrifice his bloodline. The role of father is here revealed as doomed to seek its own destruction within a system that, failing to acknowledge a child’s autonomy or subjectivity, cruelly binds her within the prison of the family. Pugh’s discussion of children rounds out his exploration of the anti-erotic ‘queering’ of human families and societies. In chapter six and in the epilogue, he explores the borderlines between the human and the divine and between the human and the animal. In The Legend of Good Women, in the Wife of Bath’s...

Truth and Tales: Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media ed. by Fiona Somerset, Nicholas Watson

Reviewed by: Truth and Tales: Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media ed. by Fiona Somerset, Nicholas Watson Eric Weiskott Fiona Somerset and Nicholas Watson, eds., Truth and Tales: Cultural Mobility and Medieval Media. Interventions: New Studies in Medieval Culture. Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv, 294. isbn: 978–0–8142–1271–4. $69.95. This collection, dedicated to Richard Firth Green, grew out of the fourth annual meeting of the Canada Chaucer Seminar (Toronto, April 2012). The volume’s fourteen essays move across and between the large topics of popular culture, orality and literacy, and media studies, with a primary focus on medieval English literature and culture. The contributions are organized into three central sections: ‘Repetition and Continuity: The Claims of History’ (Thomas Hahn, Stephen Yeager, M. J. Toswell, and Fiona Somerset), ‘Cultural Divides and Their Common Ground’ (Alastair Minnis, Michael Johnston, Lisa J. Kiser, and Barbara A. Hanawalt), and ‘New Media and the Literate Laity’ (Nicholas Watson, Robyn Malo, Kathleen E. Kennedy, and Michael Van Dussen). These are bookended by two single-essay sections entitled ‘The Truth of Tales 1’ (Green) and ‘The Truth of Tales 2’ (Andrew Taylor). Intersecting the editors’ chronological/methodological groupings, one can discover various subconversations about, e.g., vernacular theology (Toswell, Minnis, Watson, and Malo), merchants and their books (Johnston, Malo, and Kennedy), the way in which literature encodes human-animal relations (Somerset and Kiser), and London law (Hanawalt and Kennedy). In the Introduction, Somerset situates the contributions in relation to new developments in media studies and orality and literacy as these pertain to medieval English social and literary history. In ‘“The Vanishing Leper” and “The Murmuring Monk”: Two Medieval Urban Legends,’ Green traces two medieval tales across languages, discursive fields, and social contexts, arguing that the rubric of ‘contemporary legend’ offers a way to understand the social functions of some [End Page 152] promiscuous medieval texts. In ‘Don’t Cry for Me, Augustinus: Dido and the Dangers of Empathy,’ Hahn reads the uses of Dido in Chaucer’s House of Fame and Legend of Good Women against earlier and later depictions, contending that Chaucer has his two narrators enact a schoolboy cathexis on Dido in the course of founding ‘a new vernacular poetics’ (48). In ‘The New Plow and the Old: Law, Orality, and the Figure of Piers the Plowman in B 19,’ Yeager historicizes the figure of Piers Plowman in terms of fourteenth-century appropriations of Anglo-Saxon legal and homiletic documentary forms, concluding that Piers Plowman B 19 ‘is highly concerned with administrative transparency’ (75). In ‘The Exegesis of Tears in Lambeth Homily 17,’ Toswell discusses a short English homily on the exegesis of tears, found in two late twelfth- or early thirteenth-century manuscript collections, as paradigmatic of ‘a changing attitude to the vernacular in the second half of the twelfth century’ (95). In ‘Mingling with the English in Laʒamon’s Brut,’ Somerset uses the keywords leode ‘people; land’ and leoden ‘language’ to trace the poetics and politics of national belonging in the Brut. In ‘Unquiet Graves: Pearl and the Hope of Reunion,’ Minnis compares the Pearl poet’s representation of postmortem community to that of earlier, contemporary, and later texts, revealing that ‘Pearl offers a quite robust response to that desire for the postmortem persistence of family ties that has been such an abiding component of popular narrative and theological speculation alike’ (134). In ‘Mercantile Gentility in Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.2.38,’ Johnston reads an understudied Middle English poem alongside other literary treatments of the question of gentility within and beyond CUL MS Ff.2.38, uncovering literary reactions to ‘the ongoing interpenetration of the landed and urban spheres in late-medieval England’ (149). In ‘Resident Aliens: The Literary Ecology of Medieval Mice,’ Kiser canvasses the mice of late medieval fables for evidence of medieval attitudes toward real mice, focusing on habitat, diet, species terminology, and relationships to human life. In ‘Toward the Common Good: Punishing Fraud among the Victualers of Medieval London,’ Hanawalt introduces the written regulations and public punishments governing the manufacture and sale of bread, meat pies, and wines in late medieval London, with glances at mentions of millers, bakers, and...

Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England ed. by Frank Grady and Andrew Galloway (review)

FRANK GRADY AND ANDREW GALLOWAY, eds., Answerable Style: The Idea of the Literary in Medieval England. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2013. Pp. 341. isbn: 0-8142-1207-7. $74.95.Rarely does a collection of essays hold together as well as this one-assembled in honor of Anne Middleton. Evoking in its title her essay 'Aelfric's Answerable Style,' the collection seeks to address 'the idea of the literary' (again a reference to one of Middleton's seminal essays, 'The Idea of Public Poetry in the Reign of Richard II') by modeling how careful attention to formal, stylistic, and aesthetic matters in medieval texts might guide our scholarship.The essays are clustered into two sections. The first centers on Latin literary theory as it is manifest in vernacular literary practice; the second zeroes in on vernacular literary work itself, and what that practice can tell us about the literary ideas that inspired its production. The majority of essays in the first section are on Langland; those in the second half range more widely.In a thunderous opening move, Rita Copeland contributes a revisionist history of how Horace's Ars poetica factors into the efflorescence of medieval literary theory, showing how that text transitions from being an elementary schooltext to a 'global theoretical authority' (16) partially through the emergence of medieval artes poeticae, including Matthew of Vendome's and Geoffrey of Vinsauf's works. By synthesizing, refracting, and simplifying Horatian principles into de facto handbooks, these medieval writers freed Horace's text from its role as an elementary text and opened it up to the kind of readings it would have in the Renaissance, namely, as a 'poet's poem and a standard of literary judgment' (30).Wendy Scase's essay shows how Langland's shifting poem, precisely because of its complex structure at every scale and its dizzying channeling of Latin rhetorical practices, becomes a vernacular authority on composition for other, later authors- namely, those in the so-called Piers Plowman tradition. In Scase's view, Langland's poem was valuable not just for its content, but also because it allowed vernacular poets to calque onto the vernacularized rhetorical and structural moves that Langland makes. As she puts it, '...Piers transmitted to the Piers-tradition poets a vocabulary for aligning their vernacular practice with that of the schoolroom' (50).Building on Scase's modeling of how Langland acts as a kind of fulcrum between Latinate and vernacular literary practices, Traugott Lawler points up a series of instances in the poem in which Langland seems to be slyly and craftily translating Latin set-phrases, quotations, and tropes into English. Examining these unannounced translations allows us to see that Langland's poem has its origin decisively in Latin literary traditions, and in the many occulted voices that that tradition spun out into late Middle English literary culture.The problem of multiple voices shapes Katherine Zieman's essay on House of Fame and The Canterbury Tales. For Zieman, the House of Fame's famous wicker cage becomes a figure for thinking through the ever-thorny issue of character vs. subjectivity in Chaucer studies: the wicker cage evokes the press of 'common voices' (79) that Chaucer then creates in his larger work, experimenting all the while with the spectrum that joins 'open' personae to 'closed' personae. In its wicker cage-like experimentations with voicing and complex intertextuality, Zieman argues, the Tales have a great deal of tangency with more overtly 'public' poetry, such as Piers Plowman.Katharine Breen's essay turns our attention, via a close and careful reading of the Anima scene in the B-text of Piers Plowman, back to the idea that Langland's poem is heavily embroidered with Latin formal tropes and devices. In this case, Breen argues that the visual didactic form of the Speculum theologiae is a Latinate tool for abstract thought that Langland ably translates not only into the vernacular from Latin, but also into words alone from a combination of words and images. …

Vowel Change Found in Geoffrey Chaucer�s The House of Fame: Great Vowel Shift

It has already been understood that Great Vowel Shift (GVS) takes the major differences between the pronunciation in Middle English and Modern English. GVS is a change in pronunciation of vowel sounds in English language. The evidence of this change can be attained through written texts. It can be found by comparing Geoffrey Chaucers literary works to William Shakespeares works to see the differences. However, in this paper I focused only on analyzing the GVS in Geoffrey Chaucers poem entitled The house of Fame. The purpose of this study is to find out what kind of sound shift appears in The House of Fame and to explain in what phonological environment the vowel shift takes place. The result shows that there are seven kinds of sound shifts found in the poem. Those are [e:][i:], [i:][a?], [?:][o:], [?:][e:], [a:] [?:] [e?], [o:] [u:], and [u:] [au]. Besides, from this study, it can be concluded that there are three kinds of phonological environments employed in vowel shift.Keywords: Great Vowel Shift, Geoffrey Chaucer

The House of Fame by Geoffrey Chaucer (review)

Reviewed by: The House of Fameby Geoffrey Chaucer C. K. Y. Saville Chaucer, Geoffrey, The House of Fame(Durham Medieval and Renaissance Texts, 3), ed. Nick Havely, 2ndedn Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2013; paperback; pp. xiv, 274; R.R.P. CA$25.00; ISBN 9780888445636. In the words of editor, Nick Havely, ‘an edition – even a second one – of The House of Fameis never finished’, and this edition is indeed not definitive. It is, however, an up-to-date, aesthetically pleasing edition of the poem, which pays careful attention to all five original manuscript texts and claims to offer a ‘more substantial (though not exhaustive) list of variants than is available in the most recent ( Riverside Chaucer) edition’. Like the majority of editors, Havely chooses Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Fairfax 16 as his base text on account of its tidy state and the fact that it is the earliest of all five manuscripts (dated about fifty or sixty years after the poem’s generally postulated date of composition). He preserves almost all the original spellings in his transcription, including the retention of final ‘e’s even where ungrammatical and unmetrical, and is in general conservative in his adoption of the emendations of past editors, or, occasionally, his own. Aside from the lengthy bibliography of scholarly criticism, the main contribution of this edition is the delineation of the unique character of each manuscript, identifying the flaws, defects, and distinctions between the manuscripts in detailed textual notes. In this respect, Havely offers an authoritative version of the text, appropriate for a scholar or graduate student. An example of the value of Havely’s conservative approach is found at line 2018 where he prints ‘Laughe! and eke in poynt to breste’ (as contained in MS Fairfax 16 and Oxford, MS Bodley 636) rather than ‘Languysshe and eek in point to breste’ (as contained in other MSS). He draws appropriate attention to the divergence from the general editorial practice, explaining why he chooses ‘Laughe’ instead of ‘Languysshe’, explaining that it ‘marks a turning point in the Eagle’s long sentence’ where he changes the subject [End Page 280]from reflection on the dreamer’s misfortunes back to the main point of his discussion: ‘the promise of diversion.’ This edition also differs from other recent versions, such as Katheryn Lynch’s Dream Visions and Other Poems(Norton, 2007), and his own Chaucer’s Dream Poetry(Longman, 1997), in its glossing. Instead of a running marginal gloss, Havely includes a rather meagre gloss in footnote form at the bottom of the page, and a select glossary at the end of the book. This suggests an experienced intended readership, but if such an audience is to be offered a glossary, something more elaborate than one-word equivalents would be useful. An example can be found at line 1287, where a glossary might usefully have pointed to unexpected meanings and connotations of difficult and/or technical words. Havely includes a footnote observing that the ‘berile’ walls may recall the temple mentioned earlier in the poem, or the transparency of the walls of the New Jerusalem. He fails to note, however, that ‘berile’ is also a stone used for the optical lenses of eye-glasses, with the power to magnify through multiplying and expanding the speciesin the medium, hence making the objects seen through the stone seem larger than they are. This reading is not only supported by the immediate context, but can be plausibly linked to the Eagle’s discussion of how sound travels by means of multiplication of speciesthrough the medium of air. This accurate and scholarly edition of The House of Fameis a useful alternative to the Riverside Chauceredition, offering up-to-date information about dating, language, and verse style, a brief appendix containing Caxton’s ending and explicit, as well as press corrections in Thynne’s1532 edition, and a substantial commentary section at the end of the book. Nevertheless, the revisions taking into account recent studies in The House of Fameaside, there is no great difference between Havely’s 1994 and 1997 editions and the present one, nor is it the ideal introduction to...

Voys Lessons: Whirling Words in Chaucer’s “House of Rumour”

“Voys Lessons: Whirling Words in Chaucer’s ‘House of Rumour’” examines the lability of sound and its use in the dissemination, transposition, and authorship of stories within The House of Fame , a text exemplifying the mobility and flexibility of misused or unhinged words, as expressed through sound as opposed to text. By engaging the use and interpretation of sound in contrast to words, this new reading concentrates on the idea of narrative as material artifact with limited stasis. Geffrey’s pseudo-authorship, through his voyeuristic stance, engages the textuality of sounds and shows the related subtlety, elasticity, and democratic sociohistorical aspect of narrative construction. Chaucer’s dreamscape and use of authorial characters allows this argument to reposition the mobility and nature of sound, emphasizing its critical importance in the formation and corruption of stories, both written and oral.