MLR, 98.1, 2003 161 topic he introduces, that authority is undermined by his repeated inconsistencies and blunders, so much so that our coming to understand issues and possibilities must depend to some extent upon rereading the poem and reframing the questions. In? deed, as Bullon-Fernandez has ably shown, Gower's ultimate point may be that the individual, as reader or human being, is not a fixed self, but is constructed through iterative reflection; thus at the end of the work, Amans-'John Gower', despite having rejected his priest fornot taking his plight seriously, promises to reconsider the points of his confession. For setting us analogously on a course of re-examining the poem, as well as its challenges to patriarchal authority, we can thank Bullon-Fernandez. University of Idaho Kurt Olsson Chaucer and War. By John H. Pratt. Lanham, MD, New York, and Oxford: University Press of America. 2000. xvi+ 259 pp. $42.50. ISBN 0-76181588 -0. Through ten clearly paced, sensibly written chapters?in themselves a methodical campaign?John Pratt leads us to a Chaucer who is neither pacifistic nor bellicose. Instead Pratt depicts a poet who in part has absorbed the militarism of his age; who accepts legally defined just war; who knows that war will not soon disappear from an unstable world and who knows that men like his Knight might be relied upon in times of danger; and who no doubt admired the veteran knights of his day, many of them firmlyplanted in his memory of the time when they were alive and great soldiers, men, such as John of Gaunt's famous father-in-law,Henry Grosmont, the Duke of Lancaster, the Black Prince, and Sir John Chandos. But he must also have admired some of the knights around whom he patterned the portrait of his Knight, the Scropes no doubt, Sir Lewis Clifford,and more than likelyHenry Bolingbroke, who took afterhis grandfather,Henry Grosmont. (pp. 211-12) Although Pratt discusses words, lines, and passages from several poems?principally Troilus and Criseyde and the Knight's portrait and tale?his strengths are not, in this study at least, those of a supple reader focused on the subtleties of complex passages; indeed, his commentary is sometimes offhanded and deflating. Rather, Pratt would illuminate Chaucer's knowledgeof the instruments and armaments ofmedieval warfare, along with Chaucer's realistic touches; moreover, he would clear Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrim Knight from any hint of the mercenary. Pratt succeeds nicely in the firsttask and credibly if not altogether persuasively in the second. We have misunderstood some of Chaucer's military terms and we have not precisely noted how discriminating Chaucer is when writing about warfare as distinct, say, from tournament competitions. Pratt suggests that 'armee' in the Knight's portrait might be an 'armada', that 'mortal batailles' might include a reference to the main battle group of medieval armies; and that the formal duels or 'lystes' might have been single combats against enemies ofthe Faith. He shows, perhaps most famously and following Derek Pearsall, that Chaucer can be precisely realistic just where many readers find his writing grotesquely exaggerated, as when he has Arcite and Palamon fightlike crazed lions, like wild boars: 'up to the ancle foghte they in hir blood'. Pratt, definitively, corrects our misimpression that the two fought ankle-deep in blood; Chaucer here describes only the mundane effectof surface wounds, with blood running down 'their thighs into their chausses and grevieres" (p. 182). His second endeavour ends mixed. Pratt, anxious to redeem the Knight of any taint, of anything other than excusable imperfection driven by exigency, goes out of 162 Reviews his way to spiritualize the Knight's love of 'chivalrie, | Trouthe and honour, fredom and curteisie' (GP, 45-46). That in turn leads to the otherwise inexplicable suggestion that 'in his lordes were' means God's wars. This deviation aside, Pratt's commentary on the Knight's campaigns, informed by an impressive array of medieval accounts and commentaries, is invaluable. Pratt also deftly questions what we know for sure about English views of the campaigns at Alexandria and other sites Chaucer lists; showing that on the whole those attitudes are positive, he moves...