Yeoman's Tale Research Articles

Mobility and Identity in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Mobility and Identity in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales

Collection No Longer on Display: Restoring Medieval England’s Arabic Books to View

A dominant cultural perception of the Middle Ages – manifested in the Victoria and Albert Museum's segregation of its ‘Medieval' and ‘Islamic Gallery' rooms – falsely positions England as isolated from its global influences. In reality, the translation of Arabic books, and the contacts necessary for that translation, transformed English culture. In a medieval context, ‘translation' refers both to the movement of a text between languages and the movement of relics. The arrival of Arabic books reflects these two meanings. In medieval England, Arabic books were materially and spiritually valuable; they were treasured, collected items, and collections in their own right – anthologies which acted as libraries, emulating the Islamicate archives from which they had travelled. This essay considers two case studies drawn from the Canterbury Tales: Chaucer's direct translation of the astrologer Sahl Ibn Bishr, in the Man of Law's Tale, and of the alchemist Muhammed Ibn Umail, in the Canon's Yeoman's Tale. Although Chaucer is known today as the ‘father of English', his medieval and early modern readers were aware of his indebtedness to inherited Arabic science. I argue that centring the Arabic presence in Chaucer’s works is no modern innovation, but a return to a traditional way of reading the Canterbury Tales which can be seen in practice in manuscript and early printed records. Surviving medieval English versions of Arabic texts offer material witnesses of cross-cultural dialogue, which deserve to be displayed and read.

Chaucer's Pars Secunda Canon: A New Identification

Abstract Chaucer's conniving canon in pars secunda of the Canon's Yeoman's Tale has been traditionally identified with William Shuchirch, canon of the king's chapel at Windsor, on the basis of research undertaken almost a century ago by H. G. Richardson and J. M. Manly. Recent research, however, suggests that no such individual was ever present as a canon of Windsor. This article reexamines both Richardson's identification and Chaucer's links with Windsor, and provides a new Windsor candidate for Chaucer's canon character. It also reassesses Chaucer's connections with the law and legal proceedings, proposing a new hypothesis for the way in which pars secunda may have been inspired by the real-life story of “William Shuchirch.” This article contributes to efforts to place Chaucer within a historical context, as a man with complex professional networks, who interacted with the politics, law, and gossip of his age to draw inspiration for his writing.

Introduction

Introduction

Dismal Science: Chaucer and Gower on Alchemy and Economy

As his title suggests, Epstein pursues a double agenda in this essay: linking both Gower's and Chaucer's views on alchemy to their understanding of economics, first of all; and secondly, contrasting their views not just on alchemy, which we already knew were quite different, but on economics too. In his final paragraph, he writes: is, for both Chaucer and Gower, an essential trope for understanding economics. But whereas idealizes alchemy as a vision of natural increase and pure wealth that is opposite of economy, Chaucer reviles alchemy as obscurantist antithesis of both technology and economics, which are logical systems that, while artificial, can only be understood rationally and empirically (248). It is not a small part of merit of Epstein's essay that it provides a brief, very clear account of background, both classical and medieval, to both poets' understandings of both alchemy and economics. The connection between two in Chaucer's work is a bit more speculative than in Gower's. Epstein makes much of depiction of priest who is victim in Canon Yeoman's Tale as an unsophisticated gull in order to portray his lack of understanding of economics as somehow parallel to his susceptibility to deceptions of alchemy. Chaucer's scientific understanding of economics is inferred from his background as collector of customs, his understanding of nature of financial dealings as revealed in Shipman's Tale, and interest in measurement and calculation displayed in his Treatise on Astrolabe. It is rather more difficult to demonstrate that these experiences underlay his dismissal of alchemy as false science. Epstein has a bit more to work with in Gower's case since has much to say about profitlessness of quest for gold in an economic sense in his discussion of Avarice in Book V of CA, in seeming contrast to his approval of science, if not modern practice, of production of gold by alchemy in Book IV. Epstein explains Gower's allusion to the time, er gold was smite / In coign, that men florin knewe (V.334-35), when there was no deception and no war, as a reference not to some vague Golden Age in ancient past but to Edward III's minting of gold coins beginning in 1344, which and other contemporaries blamed for social divisions and other turmoil of their own time. In Book IV, on other hand, in praising ancient practice of alchemy, describes it as a natural process, not transmuting base metals into some other form but instead restoring them to their purest form. Epstein summarizes significance of this juxtaposition as he brings his discussion of to a close: Gower begins Book V of 'Confessio' with words 'Obstat auaricia legibus' (Avarice obstructs laws of nature). He endorses alchemy before he excoriates money because alchemy stands in contrast to mercantilism as a myth of natural wealth. Alchemy in Book IV is everything that money in Book V is not: ordered, organic, bounded by natural extremes, rational, obedient to consistent laws, commensurable, and equitable. One of qualities of money that most disturbed ancient and modern thinkers was that, through exchange and interest, it seemed to be able to multiply itself, and therefore to create wealth ex nihilo, without labor or material. But in Gower's understanding, alchemist's labor leads material, through the comfort of fire, to ideal form it most desires. Some of greatest minds of thirteenth and fourteenth centuries worried that alchemy, by increasing amount of (natural or synthetic) gold and silver, could destabilize money economy. seems to have harbored greater concerns about destabilizing effects of money economy itself. Alchemy for was a myth of profit without money or exchange, of value that is absolute rather than relative, of wealth that is organic, natural, universal, elemental, and inalienable from innate value of material. Alchemy allowed him, as it must have allowed many of his contemporaries, to entertain a vision of labor, wealth, and profit while maintaining his belief in a moral social system rooted in ancient concepts of justice and fair exchange. The elixir, says, can refine every metal, 'And pureth hem be such a weie / That al vice goth aweie' (IV:2555-56). But, it is also lost. The science itself is true, but we cannot recover it to modern world, which, even by Gower's time, was thoroughly monetized (231-32). [PN. Copyright John Society. eJGN 34.1]

Teaching Chaucer and Popular Culture:

This essay is inspired both by an increasing disciplinary contention that Chaucerians engage with popular culture and by a refreshed critical interest (reflected in the burgeoning field of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning) in sharing pedagogical innovations and interests with peers within a public forum.2 Notwithstanding lingering professional suspicions about the value of the popular, engagement with popular culture involves the need both to better communicate Chaucer’s aesthetic distinction to the culture at large and to embrace the popular in our teaching. This essay offers a brief meditation on the value of the popular and offers two theoretical approaches that one might use to introduce the study of Chaucer’s popular constructions into the classroom. I suggest, in short, that Chaucer’s reproduction in popular culture has both pedagogical and critical value—both as interpretations of his poetry as it is adapted to

Wayward Sons and Failing Fathers:

It has been a long time since anyone has taken seriously the possibility that a literary source might ever be identified for Chaucer’s Cook’s Tale. The reason for this is not simply that this tale has been preserved only in what appears to be an accidentally truncated form.1 Even at fifty-eight lines long, it remains a substantial “stub,” and it provides a number of potential clues to the nature of the story that Chaucer probably intended to tell.2 Indeed, it defines its dramatis personae and its thematic concerns so fully as to create what is actually quite a detailed profile for the identity of its source, and it is perhaps precisely because this profile is so detailed that it has always seemed so difficult to find an exact enough match for it among all the classical or medieval stories that Chaucer is likely to have known. In other words, it is not an absence of

Locating Authorial Ethics:

Locating Authorial Ethics:

John M. Fyler, Language and the Declining World in Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de MeunLanguage and the Declining World in Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun. John M. Fyler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xii+306.

<i>John M. Fyler</i>, Language and the Declining World in Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun<i>Language and the Declining World in Chaucer, Dante, and Jean de Meun</i>. John M. Fyler. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. xii+306.

Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance (review)

Reviewed by: Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance Carolyne Larrington Corinne Saunders , Magic and the Supernatural in Medieval English Romance. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 2010. Pp. 312. ISBN: 978-1-84384-221-7. $95. Corinne Saunders' substantial new study of medieval English romances comprises two short books in one volume: an introduction to medieval magic and an analysis of the functions of magic and the supernatural across a wide range of English romances. The book's central premise is that however 'rich and strange' magic might be, 'it is always grounded in cultural reality' (2). The first half of the volume—the two chapters concluding on p. 116—offers a condensed but lucid history of magic in the West. The first chapter examines classical evidence for different kinds of beliefs and magicians, and the Old and New Testament treatments of magic and its practitioners. The second chapter covers medieval thinking about magic and the supernatural, from Augustine, via Isidore of Seville to evidence from Anglo-Saxon and post-Conquest England. The high medieval period essentially distinguishes between natural magic, a magic which harnesses the unseen powers of plants, stones and other God-created objects in a pseudo-scientific analysis of causes and effects, and 'nigromancy,' understood as derived from Latin niger (black) rather than the Greek necros (dead) and thus not, as in classical sources, the re-animation of the dead for divinatory purposes. Saunders includes the operations of the supernatural, both divine and diabolical, thus making analytical space for the activities of demons and for God's countervailing interventions in the form of angelic messages and of miracles. After establishing the main outlines of the understanding of 'nigromancy' as contained in books and made operational in incantation and ritual, and of natural magic, inhering in stones and plants, the book examines magical technology. Building on Helen Cooper's crucial insight into the importance of 'magic that doesn't work'— supernatural assistance which the hero must discard or disregard if he is to achieve [End Page 131] heroic status—the third chapter culminates in astute readings of Chaucer's Squire's Tale and Franklin's Tale, noting that the Franklin himself seems to take a more conservative view of magic than Chaucer, whose interest in astrology has strong affinities with natural magic. These tales, and the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, invite the audience of The Canterbury Tales to debate the morality and limitations of magic. The next chapter investigates 'nigromancy,' the darker aspect of magic, used to effect the manipulator's will, to interfere with destiny. Here the distinction between the two types of magic is usefully complicated by reference to intention: enchantresses and other practitioners achieve diametrically opposed effects by broadly similar methods. What matters is the intended outcome, whether the romance's hero is helped or hindered by such interventions. Shape-shifting and other transformations, even, in late texts such as Valentine and Orson, the summoning of demons, can be licit if the ends are justifiable. Chapter five deals with the Other World, with Avalon and with faery, contrasting the operation of fairy mistresses who shower riches on their chosen lovers and fairy knights whose methods include rape and abduction. The main discussion of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a text with marvelous objects as well as Other World settings, occurs here. The following chapter examines the interventions of the demonic and the divine in romances as various as Amys and Amylion, Havelok, and the various romances labeled as 'penitential' by Andrea Hopkins. Discussion here of the demonic siring of Merlin introduces the book's final chapter, an examination of Malory's treatment of magic and the supernatural. There is an illuminating discussion of Hallewes the Enchantress and the episode in which she figures and thoughtful consideration of Balin and Balan and of the Grail. Saunders effectively refutes the view that Malory is not interested in magic and the supernatural simply because he reduces what occurs in his French sources, by showing how 'the supernatural lightens and shifts within the narrative of [Malory's] world, which is coloured and challenged by the powers of magic and enchantment, human and otherworldly' (260). The epilogue shows...

Manly and Rickert and the Failure of Method

Manly and Rickert and the Failure of Method A. S. G. Edwards Vance Ramsey, in his extended defense of Manly and Rickert's The Text of the Canterbury Tales, makes the following assertion: "Contrary to the absolutists, no intelligent person can doubt that learning, taste and judgment must be exercised by any editor worthy of the name, but they should be the very last resort of an editor and not the first."1 I doubt whether anyone with experience of editing Middle English texts (as Ramsey had not) would formulate the problems of editorial intervention in such a categorical way. Nor is it clear what "absolutists" (whatever the term is intended to mean) he has in mind. And if "learning, taste and judgment" are to be the "last" resort of the editor, what is to be the first?2 It is worth applying this last question to the editorial activities of Manly and Rickert, that is, to those portions of their work specifically concerned with presenting a text of the Canterbury Tales, volumes 3 and 4. These volumes have important practical implications for their larger undertaking. One might reasonably assume that the very first procedural matter that any editor would wish to establish would be the choice of the base text, which will provide the lemmata for the edition, that is, the forms against which other witnesses will be collated. Normally such a base text would also provide, in general terms, the orthographic forms for the text, what are now termed its "accidentals." The term "accidentals" derives from the influential editorial theory [End Page 337] of W. W. Greg in his classic paper "The Rationale of Copy-Text."3 Although Greg draws his examples in this essay from Renaissance texts, his formulations drew on considerable experience of Middle English works and he had also made extended study of the problems of manuscripts of the Canterbury Tales.4 According to Ramsey, Greg had also been in correspondence with Manly and Rickert in the 1920s and 1930s.5 It is clear that the experience of medieval literature helped to shape his thinking.6 The idea of copy-text makes a clear distinction in textual authority between the accidentals (the spelling forms) of a base text and its substantive readings. Greg suggests that generally the earliest surviving witness (that closest in time to the author's original) provides authority for accidentals, while questions of substantive variation between witnesses can be assessed on a case-by-case basis using a full range of editorial resources (including doubtless "learning, taste and judgment"). Greg's formulation offers a clear and flexible statement of method: establish the choice of copy-text to provide a formal basis for a text, but emend its substantive readings on appropriate grounds. It is a statement of method that, in the case of the Canterbury Tales, invalidates the lengthy and fruitless debate over the textual superiority of Hengwrt or Ellesmere that Manly and Rickert conduct through assertion rather than the presentation of evidence.7 For any edition of the work must perforce [End Page 338] take Ellesmere as its copy-text on wholly pragmatic grounds: it is early, dialectally consistent and, more compelling, it is the more complete of the two (Hengwrt lacks of course The Canon's Yeoman's Tale and much of The Parson's Tale and the Retraction), and it offers a more convincing order. Any debate about the superiority of particular readings in Hengwrt (or indeed other manuscripts) remains a matter of individual editorial judgment. Most editions now begin by identifying their "base text" or "copy-text" (the terms are often used synonymously). Such a statement might reasonably be seen as the "first resort" of any editor. But not Manly and Rickert. Their textual methodology of course predates Greg's paper, but it has always been editorial convention to identify the text on which an edition is based. They do not. They do identify the grounds for one aspect of their textual procedure. They state: "As the basis for collation we chose Skeat's 'Student's Edition.'"8 Although they give no more details, the edition they used is presumably W. W. Skeat's one-volume Student's...

Chaucer as a London Poet: A Review Essay

Chaucer as a London Poet:A Review Essay David Raybin When, in the Fall of 2006, I proposed to speak to the Illinois Medieval Association on Chaucer and London, I was imprudent. I imagined the project to be not only interesting—which it is—but also safe. Only David Wallace—so I imagined—had written at all recently on the subject, back in 1992 in his essay on "Chaucer and the Absent City," and as I don't think London is absent in Chaucer's work, and most particularly in the Canterbury Tales, I looked forward to the opportunity to respond to him.1 What I hadn't appreciated is that the subject had turned, if not quite hot, at least tepid (see the Appendix): Michael Hanrahan has a "London" chapter in Peter Brown's 2000 Companion to Chaucer; David Benson has a chapter on "London" in Steve Ellis's 2005 Chaucer: An Oxford Guide; Marion Turner has a chapter entitled "Politics and London Life" in Corinne Saunders and David Bradshaw's 2006 Concise Companion to Chaucer, and her Chaucerian Conflict: Languages of Antagonism in Late Fourteenth-Century London was released by Oxford in January 2007. Most disconcerting, in May 2006 Boydell and Brewer issued Ardis Butterfield's groundbreaking collection, Chaucer and the City, an offshoot of the 2002 London Chaucer Conference on "Cities, Courts, Provinces." Not only does this splendid volume include another chapter by Benson, "Literary Contests and London Records in the Canterbury Tales," and thus certify that the moderator of the session in which I was to speak knows far more about the present subject than I do; but the volume's essays, written by a stellar cast, "All are," in Butterfield's words, grounded in a sense, profoundly articulated by David Wallace, that Chaucer's writings offer a conundrum. Chaucer may be a city icon but London does not emerge as clearly or directly from his poetry as that might suggest. Trying to understand the city [End Page 21] in Chaucer involves confronting this strangeness: Chaucer's poetry rebuffs as much as invites our efforts to grasp its urban character.2 It's not enough that I was thinking to contest Wallace; I was up against a Wallace army. The book is dedicated to him! I rather expected Benson to show up in blue face paint. Cognizant now of the new state of the field, what I offer in these pages are first a review of current thinking on Chaucer and London, and then a few reflections of my own. Wallace argues that where the countryside offers a "mysterious and powerful" presence in Chaucer, "the city is chiefly notable by its absence." The Troy of Troilus and Criseyde suggests "something of the experience of a walled medieval city," but it "plainly differs from Chaucer's London" in that the events of the poem take place "within a unified walled space," while those of Chaucer's time "were conducted between such spaces: between, that is, London and Westminster." The Canterbury Tales amplifies the elision of London, as Chaucer pointedly begins the pilgrimage not in London, but "south of the Thames in Southwark; the "projected return journey . . . is never made"; and "Chaucer's solitary attempt at pure London fiction [the Cook's Tale] comes to an abrupt end after just 58 lines" (156). This said, Wallace proceeds to analyze Chaucer's treatment of London in both the Cook's Tale and the Canon's Yeoman's Tale and uncovers an attitude that presents London as a locus of transgression and punishment. In Letter Book H of the London Guildhall records, for example, Wallace finds numerous "narratives of crimes and misdemeanors" containing "some quite spectacular examples of native wit and inventiveness" (159) that help us to appreciate Chaucer's articulation of London discourses "freighted with suggestions of duplicity and bad faith" (178). Comparison to Boccaccio suggests how extreme is Chaucer's vision of the city: where the Florentine "establishes a form of associational governance within the city that is then carried to the countryside" (158), the Englishman moves "the disease that infects . . . the blind alleys of the suburbs . . . to the city itself" (178). For Chaucer, then, the city is...

Elves on the Brain: Chaucer, Old English, and elvish

Because Chaucer, through the mouthpiece of Harry Bailey, described himself as elvish in line 703 of the prologue to The Tale of Sir Thopas, the precise meanings of the Middle English word elvish have attracted a fair amount of commentary. Besides a reassessment of previous work by J. A. Burrow in 1995, the word has recently enjoyed a thorough consideration by Richard Firth Green. Green emphasised that to understand the reference in the prologue to Sir Thopas, we must also consider the semantics of elvish elsewhere in Chaucer's work, in lines 751 and 842 of The Canon's Yeoman's Tale. He argued further that Chaucer's usage of elvish is liable to have drawn connotations from the meanings of its root elf – and ably elucidated these. However, some useful evidence for the meanings of elvish has been passed over. One revealing Middle English attestation remains to be adduced. Moreover, Old English attests once to elvish's etymon ælfisc, as well as to another adjectival derivative of the elf-word, ylfig. The evidence of these Old English words is more complex, but also more revealing, than has been realised. Taken together, this new evidence affords new perspectives on the history of elvish, on what it may have meant to Chaucer, and on the significance of elves in medieval English-speaking cultures. In particular, while Chaucer doubtless kept elves in mind as he used elvish, in ways which Green's research illuminates, the word seems certainly in Old and Middle English to have had developed senses not strictly related to its literal meaning, along the lines of ‘delusory’, while the apparent sense of elvish in the prologue to Sir Thopas, ‘abstracted’, finds parallels in the Old English ylfig.

An introduction to the Canterbury tales: reading, fiction, context

Chaucer and the Canterbury Tales The General Prologue The Knight's Tale The Miller's Tale The Reeve's Tale The Cook's Tale The Man of Law's Tale The Wife of Bath's Tale The Friar's and Summoner's Tales The Clerk's Tale The Merchant's Tale The Squire's and Franklin's Tale The Physician's Tale The Pardoner's Tale The Shipman's Tale The Prioress's Tale Sir Thopas and Melibee The Monk's Tale The Nun's Priest's Tale The Second Nun's Tale The Canon Yeoman's Tale The Manciple's Tale The Parson's Tale Bibliography Index

Intention to Write, Intention to Teach: Vernacular Poetry and Pedagogy in Thomas Norton's Ordinal of Alchemy

Connections made by scholars between language and alchemy generally focus on the enigmatic or obscure technical jargon used by alchemists throughout alchemy's extensive history. Only occasionally do critical studies of medieval alchemical texts examine these works for their contribution to the canon of medieval vernacular literature or literary theory. Not surprisingly, scholarly discussions of alchemical writing in Middle English literature focus primarily on Chaucer. As recently as a 1999 article in the Chaucer Review, Mark J. Bruhn in "Art, Anxiety, and Alchemy in the Canon's Yeoman's Tale" discusses alchemy as "a metaphor for Chaucer's poetry." "[W] e should have no difficulty," say_s Bruhn, in "construing the ground of the metaphor between Chaucerian letters and alchemical multiplication" (p. 309). Jane Hilberry in a 1987 article on the technical language of the Canon's Yeoman's Tale argues that alchemy's "primary attraction lies in the language that surrounds the practice." She concludes her article: "While Chaucer in the Canon's Yeoman's Tale confirms alchemy's failure to change base metals into gold, he succeeds in transmuting the language of alchemy into poetry" (p. 442). We do find, then, an effort by medievalists to explore the relationship between language and alchemy in English literature, albeit seemingly limited to an interest in Chaucer's poetry rather than in his specific use of the English language.

The Conclusion of the Canon's Yeoman's Tale : Readings and (Mis)readings

The Conclusion of the Canon's Yeoman's Tale : Readings and (Mis)readings

Chaucer to Shakespeare: Essays in Honour of Shinsuke Ando ed. by Toshiyuki Takamiya, Richard Beadle

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER I would disagree with that judgment, suggesting the descriptions in The GeneralPrologue, Palamon and Arcite's first view of Emelye, and a number of passages in The House ofFame 3 that are strikingly definitive of the characters of Geffrey the Pilgrim, Palamon and Arcite, and the dreamer of The House ofFame. I am no less appreciative of Stanbury's book for this disagreement: good critics energize their readers, and more needs to be said on just how description functions in Chaucer's poetry. In summary, this is a serious, intelligent, and perceptive work that elegantly meets the challenge of studying technique in the Cotton Nero poems. It is not a comprehensive study to compare with those of A. C. Spearing and Lynn Staley Johnson (to cite two examples), but it is not intended to be so. Stanbury has taken what is in some ways a bolder and riskier tack- to explore a closely related set of descriptive topoi- and her success makes this a worthwhile and valuable book. J. STEPHEN RUSSELL Hofstra University TOSHIYUKI TAKAMIYA and RICHARD BEADLE, eds. Chaucer to Shake­ speare: Essays in Honour of Shinsuke Ando. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992. Pp. xiii, 255. $70.00. Shinsuke Ando, still in his early sixties, is representative of the middle generation of Japanese scholars of English literature. The earlier genera­ tion, represented by the revered, recently deceased Michio Masui, made important contributions to the study of medieval and Renaissance lan­ guage and poetic. Ando's generation moved on to historical and critical interpretation of the literature, as represented in Ando's own bibliography, included in the volume. The younger generation, represented by the contributors to this festschrift, has moved on to psychological and the­ oretical study of the production and reception of the literature. The festschrift is acollection oftwenty-three very sophisticated essays, six on Chaucer, seven on Shakespeare, and the others on various medieval and Elizabethan authors and topics. One cannot hope in a review to analyze twenty-three essays individually, but let me say a word or two about those that interested me most. Ruth Morse's "Temperamental Texts: Medieval Discussions of Character, Emotion, and Motivation" is a very suggestive 282 REVIEWS exploration ofthe movement in medieval culture from interest in action to concern about intention. Richard Axton's "Chaucer and'Tragedy' " points up the incompatibility ofChristianity and tragedy, andChaucer's tendency to blunt tragedy with pathos. Yasunari Takada's "From the House a/Fame to Politico-Cultural Histories" is a sophisticated discussion of Chaucer's transformation ofthe Boethian vision ofa cosmosgoverned by enlightened authority to a politicohistorical macrocosm administered for "comune profit." Richard Beadle's "'I wol nat telle it yit': John Selden and a Lost Version ofthe Cook's Tale" offers interesting evidence for a lost text of The Canon's Yeoman's Tale, although it does not help explain the presence of Gamelyn in the manuscripts. John Burrow's "The Griffin's Egg: Gower's Confessio Amantts 1.2545" is a nice description, with illustrations, of goblets made ofostrich-egg shells, referred to by Gower and others in their poetry. Takami Matsuda's "The Presence ofPurgatory in Two Debates in BL MS Addit. 37049" is astonishing in its familiarity with a broad range of medieval European religious literature. Joerg Fichte's "The Passion Plays in Ludus Coventriae and the Continen­ tal Passion Plays" is likewise remarkable for the way it juxtaposes the English, French, and German Passion plays, an intercultural connection too seldom recognized. Soji Iwasaki's "Relative Values in Medieval and Renaissance Drama" goes beyond recognition ofthe morality-play opposi­ tions between good and evil to point out that reconciliation of these oppositions into harmony in the ideal image ofman is the Renaissance form of the medieval dichotomy. Derek Brewer's "Elizabethan Merry Tales and The Merry Wives of Windsor: Shakespeare and Popular Literature" finds the source of humor in Shakespeare's and others' plays in the popular Elizabethan "jest books." My own taste obviously inclines me toward the essays on medieval topics. Barbara Hardy's "Telling the Future: Forecasts and Fantasies in Shake­ speare's Narrative," Norman Blake's "Why and What in Shakespeare," Hidekatsu Nojima...

Chaucer and the Silence of History: Situating the Canon's Yeoman's Tale

Dissonances within texts may result from contradictions within ideology or the contradiction between ideology and history. The disjunctions between the two parts of the Canon's Yeoman's Tale, between both parts and the ending, and the gaps within each of the parts can be explained as arising with the contradiction between Chaucer's ideological project in the tale—an attack on the emergence of productive capital—and the literary means for the attack. The result is a confession told without moral content and then a fabliau made to serve Christian morality. Productive capital, which is virtually unrepresented elsewhere in the Chaucerian canon, is both invisible and glaring in the tale; and it competed in Chaucer's London with commercial capital, which reinforced the feudal aristocracy as well as depended on it.

Dismantling the Canterbury Book

Although several Chaucer scholars have argued for the last four tales of theCanterbury Talesas a concluding sequence, it has not been generally recognized that Chaucer ends his book deliberately and skillfully beginning with the Second Nun's Tale. Through the concluding stories Chaucer disengages himself and his audience from the fiction making of theTales, moving toward his own voice in the Retraction, and he introduces themes of transformation in tales concerning the conversion of souls (Second Nun), the transmutation of metals through alchemy (Canon's Yeoman), the metamorphosis of Apollo's crow (Manciple), and the transforming powers of contrition and penitence (Parson, Retraction). The consistency of these closure themes provides evidence for the authority of the Ellesmere manuscript as against the highly regarded and recently published Hengwrt manuscript of theTales, which has a different concluding tale order and which does not contain the Canon's Yeoman's Tale.

The "Slidynge" Yeoman: The Real Drama in the "Canon's Yeoman's Tale"

Though the Canon's Yeoman's Tale has received considerable critical attention in the past few decades, readers have been unable to agree about whether this problematic tale coheres in the way the rest do. The problem lies in the seemingly incompatible roles the Canon plays in the two parts: in Prima Pars he is a misguided scientist who is his own chief victim, and in Pars Secunda he is a cynical swindler. One solution to this problem, advanced first by Tyrwhitt and developed later by Manly, is that Chaucer wrote the second part as an address to the notorious canons of St. George's Chapel at Windsor and then added it to the Canterbury Tales by creating the fiction of the Yeoman's joining the pilgrimage.1 Such an approach, however, assumes that Chaucer has neglected the relationship between the tale and its teller, an otherwise inviolable principle in the Canterbury Tales, simply to make room for a preexistent tale about a charlatan-alchemist. It seems to me that no reading of the CYT has resolved the problem of its narrative coherence because of misunderstandings of the temperamental nature of the Yeoman and of the inadvertent drama that develops as he tells his tale. Chaucer's real interest is surely not in the Canon but in the performance of the Yeoman, who, still addicted to alchemy, vacillates between hope and despair. Emotionally and intellectually, the Yeoman is as slidynge, as unstable, as the stone he pursues. Rightly apprehended, the real drama of this tale lies not in their joining the pilgrimage but in the Yeoman's revelation of himself.2 The Yeoman begins his first tale with the intention of simply ridiculing one of the Canon's failed experiments; the first tale seems only to enkindle his anger, and so he tells a second, more revealing story. To protect himself from guilt by association, he nervously insists that the swindling Canon is not his master. But by