Chaucer: Contemporary Approaches (review)

What is engaging about the essays in this collection is their analytical, speculative, sometimes contestive turns, their proposed new directions for Chaucer studies. This unites them and explains their being collected here. Although the editors welcome "general readers" into what they call the "global community of Chaucer research" (p. vii), I don't think this book speaks to general readers—the essays are far too specific (specific in very good ways, for the editors have made fine choices)—nor do the authors here reflect a global community. The editors are correct that "active scholars" will find up-to-date summaries of the avenues of recent Chaucerian and literary inquiry as the context for what each essay does well: "spell out some pressing areas for future research" (p. vii).

The book is divided into four sections. The first, called "Chaucer's Places," contains three essays: on Italy, France, and England, and that order is significant because Chaucer's "places," as the essays in this section show, should be refigured. First, Robert R. Edwards argues against seeing Italy as a "someplace else" that enables Chaucer "to move from imitatio with the French poets to auctoritas on the strength of" trecento examples (p. 5). Italians, Italy, and Italian letters in Chaucer are, for Edwards, "a landscape of conjecture and imagination" (p. 7). We should sidestep, Edwards says, questions about hard and soft Italian analogues for Chaucer, for insisting on them narrows our understanding of Chaucer's reach: Italy includes Rome, "Chaucer's historical imaginary" (p. 11), and "Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio may speak to Chaucer through their European translators" (p. 21). Edwards's comments on the social anxiety implicit in foreign and familiar reveal, moreover, Italy's complex fourteenth-century presence in "what Chaucer rewrites and what remain foreign and unassimilable for him" (p. 21).

Next, Ardis Butterfield interrogates what has been the grounding idea about French presence in Chaucer's literary arc: that his "Frenchness" was a phase. What is ground-clearing is Butterfield's recognition of the way Charles Muscatine and others have made it difficult to see Chaucer's Frenchness as the source for his Englishness, the way one cannot, and should not, oppose Chaucer's English naturalness, his English originality—his English "outdoorness"—to artifice, to French "indoorness" (p. 28). Moreover, Butterfield's use of Derrida on being "bound" by a language that "is and is not mine" is highly productive for deconstructing the notion of Chaucer's "originary" gestures and the claims of monolingualism: language, "especially those of medieval London, did not always observe post-medieval national boundaries" (p. 40).

Finally, Kathy Lavezzo argues that "linguistic diversity, along with . . . sociopolitical upheavals and competing sites of belonging, hardly imbued Chaucer's England with the unity and similitude often linked with national thinking" (p. 50). Chaucer shares with other English authors of his period "an abiding interest in place as a means of thinking through the problem of English identity" (p. 55). Lavezzo's comments on an "elvyssh" Chaucer, "mysterious and distant" (being elf-like is a "geographical" designation), clarify Chaucer's understanding of English marginality, which his "Canterbury" tales reveal, and English liminality that he in his own poetry reflects: Chaucer's presence there "suggests the problem of English isolation." When he "gazes upon the ground—that is, English territory—and calls himself elvish, he is also calling himself English" (p. 62).

Part Two, called "Chaucer's Audiences," includes Simon Horobin's essay on manuscripts and scribes and Seth Lerer's on reception, two implicitly related essays. Horobin teases out surprising configurations of literary culture as reflected in scribal activity, observing, for example, that Doyle and Parkes's Scribe D copied Chaucer, Gower, and Langland: "While the collocation of Gower and Chaucer is a familiar one to modern scholarship, we are perhaps less comfortable with seeing Langland in this group." But the tendency to see "Chaucer, and to some extent Gower, as separate from medieval literary culture is really a reflection of modern, not medieval...