STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER made an explicit exploration of this nexus less obviously necessary to him than to his inferiors. But, in truth, it is not easy to judge this matter. Perhaps the most serious deficiency of the book as a scholarly discussion is its scorn for documenta tion. Again and again one feels the need for adequate footnoting to localize and sharpen a reference and to direct the less learned to the sources from which the details of the analysis are drawn. But there are literally no footnotes-only periodic identifications of texts and authorities in paren theses. It is true that the book is supplied with a good index and that it is completed by the compilation of a bibliographical essay which directs the reader elsewhere for further discussion. There is much here that will help the student; there is little that will answer the questions of the scholar who cannot treadconfidentlythroughthe vastminefieldofmedievalexegesis or the one who is abreast of the scholarship and who looks for the primary and secondary references which sustain the argument. And dare one say that neither party is notably helped by the highly tendentious nature of the discussion of the scholarship of the topics under examination? G. H. RUSSELL University of Melbourne HEINER GILLMEISTER. Chaucer's Conversion: Allegorical Thought inMedi eval Literature. Frankfurt am Main, Berne, Nancy, and New York: Verlag Peter Lang, 1984. Pp. ii, 289. $32.65. The core of Gillmeister's book is an exegetical interpretation of one of Chaucer's minor ballades, Truth (Balade de Bon Conseyl), but the im plications of this analysis destroy several accepted credos about Chaucer Chaucer was born in 1346 (p. 134) and in the final months of his life became a monk of the Benedictine Abbey of Westminster (p. 126). For several decades Gillmeister has read the "Vache" of Truth's Envoy anagramaticallyand exegetically with reference to 1 Samuel 6:7, first in his Discrecioun: Chaucer und die Via Regia ([Bonn, 1972], pp. 201-13), a study largely ignored in English-language reviews (brief mention in YWES 53[1972]:110), and more recently in Chaucer Newsletter(2, pt. 1 [Winter, 1980):13-14), where he provided an abstract of Chaucer's Conversion: 188 REVIEWS The exhortation "Vache, !eve!" is, in fact, the poet's name, CHAVSIER, written backwards and partly anglicized. Old French CHAVSIER, "shoemaker," when reversed becomes REISVACH, i.e., the Old French phrase reis, vache! "leave, cow!" (where the singular imperative of Old French reissir corresponds to that of Modern French sortir, sors!). Chaucer thus, by means ofa conversion ofhis name, draws attention to the fact that he has undergone a conversion in real life, an interesting instance ofthe concept ofpraesagium nominis, the medieval beliefin the prophetic force inherent in a person's name. In his latest work Gillmeister devotes 148 pages of text, 632 detailed footnotes, and a bibliography of over 300 wide-ranging and often recon dite items to elucidate this one word. Despite this massive erudition, acceptance of the whole package rests upon the word "Vache." Early editors always considered "Vache" an enigma. Skeat (Oxford Chaucer, 1:553), having noted the Boethian echoes, suggested "cow" as "less offensive" than the other "beasts" mentioned by Boethius-wolf, hound, ass, etc. To Edith Rickert goes credit for first suggesting (MP 11[1913):209-25) "ThouVache" as apersonal reference toone Sir Philip de la Vache (whose crest was a cow hoof). This argument, though accepted by most scholars, the latest being John H. Fisher (Chaucer [1977), p. 698), Gillmeister (pp. 6-10) attacks, rather snidely selecting as specimens of her documentation two trivial examples, Vache's grandfather's debt to a ropemaker and his wife's inheritance of silver salt cellars, and ignoring Rickert'scitation of mutualfriendsof Vacheand Chaucerin thecourt circle, like Sir Lewis Clifford, Thomas Percy Earl of Worcester, and Sir Thomas Clanvowe, and ignoring tooRickert's thesis that Vache's "troubles," like someof Chaucer's,arosefromthedominanceofthelordsappellantbetween 1387and1390.Moreimportant,Rickertgaveherowninterpretativetransla tion of the ballade, and on that historical level it still seems valid. If Chaucer's Conversion depended on acceptance of the Vache thesis, Gillmeister's book would survive only in some descriptive bibliography (the fate of his...