Canterbury Cathedral: Pilgrims and Tourists—Past and Present (review)

266 Short notices medium of popular entertainment. Put crudely, did the average Elizabethan make the same connection as Mullaney between, for instance, the lazar house on the city's horizon and the theatre in the Liberties? Such questions apart, Mullaney's argument is rich and provocative, and his application to a study of the Elizabethan stage of notions of the city and its geography suggests that there is still much to learn about the stage and its ideological relationship to the city and to its culture. David Buchbinder School of Communication and Cultural Studies Curtin University of Technology Robbins, Keith, Canterbury Cathedral: Pilgrims and Tourists—Past and Present (The St George's Cathedral Lecture, No. 1), 1995; paper; pp. 11; R.R.P. AUS$5.00 (Postfree,order from Professor J. Tonkin, Department of History, University of Western Australia, Nedlands, 6907.) Of necessity, a short public address such as this will be general and 'chatty'. Keith Robbins covers a great deal in eleven pages: a history of Canterbury Cathedral from Augustine's mission in 597 to the present, concentrating on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; the development of a concept of 'cathedral history' over the last few decades, and the intellectual problems inherent in such an activity; the relationship between the pilgrims of old and the tourists of today; and the relationship of the church to the political, social and economic realities of the world in which it operates. His style is lively and vivid, and certain parts of the lecture really sparkle: the detailed, witty portraits of Dean Henry Wace (1903-24) who 'appeared oblivious to the passing years' (p. 6) throughout the turbulent first and second decades of this century; Dean George Bell (1924-9), who encouraged the performance of 'biblical drama' (p. 7) and drew artists such as John Masefield, Christopher Fry and T. S. Eliot into the Canterbury environment, and whose ecumenical vision reached out to the Roman Catholic church, while his social vision saw the Cathedral chapter feeding the unemployed during the General Strike of 1926; and the 'Red Dean', Hewlett Johnson (1931-62), who invited Mahatma Gandhi to Canterbury, and who was awarded the Stalin Prize for his work for international peace, are miniature marvels. Short notices 267 The more complex issues mentioned earlier are sketchily treated, but the overall impression received from this booklet is that the 1995 St George's Cathedral Lecture was well worth attending. Carole M . Cusack School of Studies in Religion University of Sydney Wilkins, Nigel, Music in the Age of Chaucer (Chaucer Studies I), Woodbridge, D. S. Brewer, second edition, with 'Chaucer Songs', 1995; cloth; pp. xiv, 210; 54 plates; R.R.P. £39.50. Chaucer's works are full of descriptions of music-making and his poems abound in musical imagery. There are frequent references to his having composed songs (Balades, Roundels, Virelayes) and he consciously used as a stylistic model the verse of his French contemporary, the composer-poet Guillaume de Machaut. 'Now welcom somer', the rondeau which comes towards the end of The Parlement ofFoules, is introduced with the line, 'The note, I trowe, imaked was in Fraunce'. Unlike Machaut, Chaucer was not a musician, nor, so far as we know, were his lyric works set to music by contemporaries—hence the inverted commas around the title, 'Chaucer Songs'. In comparison with the rich chanson repertory of fourteenth-century France, exemplified in the works of Machaut, Britain appears to have produced very little in the way of secular polyphony. Thefirsteditions of Nigel Wilkin's Music in the Age of Chaucer and its companion volume 'Chaucer Songs' (Chaucer Studies I and IV, 1979 and 1980) were politely received fifteen years ago and have been largely ignored ever since. Intended as a general guide to the music of fourteenth-century France, Italy and Britain, the text volume was stronger on visual appeal than analytical insights. It presented little more than the standard textbook overview, supported by a disproportionate number of references to the author's own published work. Most valuable were the chapters 'Minstrels' and 'Chaucer', the latter providing an exhaustive compilation of musical references. The music volume, 'Chaucer Songs', was an imaginative and admittedly speculative attempt...