REVIEWS about the various texts she discusses, and move from that grounding into expert close readings that draw widely on political and clerical documents , many of them untranslated Latin sources. Her readings are innovative and brilliantly attentive to the ways writers draw on learned discourse to speak to particularized audiences and to position themselves within highly charged contemporary debate. If something is missing from this study, it would be a broader sweep and full play with the implications of these readings, particularly in relation to the promotion of English in this period. Aside from Piers Plowman, the texts discussed in this study are not ones widely known or read, even among academics who routinely teach Middle English at the university level. While Somerset does an adequate job of situating and explaining the texts discussed, the study remains a highly specialized one. For scholars working with these texts to explore the development of textual communities and the debates between ‘‘lewed’’ and ‘‘clergie’’ in late medieval England, this learned book will be essential reading. It remains to future scholars to lay out its implications in broader terms. Sarah Stanbury College of the Holy Cross Robert S. Sturges. Chaucer’s Pardoner and Gender Theory: Bodies of Discourse . The New Middle Ages Series. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Pp. xiii, 232. $45.00. The Pardoner has long been one of the interpretive cruxes of The Canterbury Tales, and a growing body of work in recent years has attempted to understand the Pardoner by understanding what his supposedly wayward body means. Robert Sturges’s book makes a timely and provocative intervention in this discussion, attempting to reconfigure its basic assumptions by recourse to ‘‘a post-postmodern feminism that takes the imprecisions in all the categories of sex, gender, and erotic practice, their overlap, incoherencies, and contradictions, as its object’’ (p. xxi). Chapter 1 approaches medieval and modern gender as ‘‘a social practice not quite identical with bodies and acts’’ in order to suggest that gender, ‘‘like sodomy in Foucault’s famous phrase, is an ‘utterly confused category’ both now and in the Middle Ages,’’ and that the Par595 ................. 8972$$ CH21 11-01-10 12:23:36 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER doner ‘‘can be read as a figure for this confusion, just as he is for confusions about bodies and acts’’ (pp. 23–24). The semantic ambiguity of Chaucer’s account of the Pardoner links him with the feminine, and literary antecedents for the ‘‘drunken, effeminate, boyish—and goatvoiced — Pardoner’’ in the myth of Bacchus/ Dionysus ‘‘show us a Pardoner who is both weak and strong, both unnatural and a force of nature ’’ (p. 32). Chapter 2 highlights ‘‘certain contrasting moments’’ in the modern critical debate and its attempts to fix the Pardoner’s ‘‘(over-) sexed body’’ in order ‘‘to reactivate the contradictions erased by the ideology of unitary discursive truth and its attempts to control meaning ’’ (p. 36). Sturges concludes that the Pardoner’s description ‘‘problematizes the very concept of sexual dimorphism because he makes it so difficult to decide where one sex begins and the other leaves off’’ (p. 40). Chapter 3 notes similar contradictions and instabilities both in medieval discourses about sodomy (as that which cannot signify directly or be directly signified) and in ambiguous and sometimes homophobic modern critical responses to the Pardoner’s sexuality. Sturges suggests that the Pardoner’s undecideable gender and sexuality, signifying an improper plurality of possible gender relations, achieves an effect similar to that of Monique Wittig’s ‘‘lesbian’’ in threatening to abolish the categories of sex altogether. Drawing on medieval sign theory and Lacanian psychoanalytic theory , Chapter 4, the strongest and most richly suggestive of Sturges’s readings, discusses the constructed nature of the Pardoner’s masculinity (a masculinity that Sturges argues ‘‘has heretofore been largely taken for granted’’) in terms of the hermeneutic contradictions put in play by the Pardoner’s two veils—the vernicle on his hat and the pillowcase he falsely claims as ‘‘Oure Lady veyl’’ (GP 695). The latter false relic not only contrasts with the vernicle’s iconic power to truly represent Christ but what it conceals also ‘‘emphasizes even more starkly the contrast between the...