Chaucer and his French contemporaries: natural music in the fourteenth century (review)

Reviews 165 sixteenth-century Grand Duchy of Tuscany is to move from a minimalist world to that of superabundance and not only in sources also in themes and their elaboration. Triumphalism is grandiose in its aims, forms, and documentation. It exists in processions, in the lavish ephemera of arches and mise en scene, in 'how-to-do-it'texts,in programmes of past performances, and in visual images as in Vasari's frescoes. Thus Starn and Partridge link the entrance of Giovanna of Austria and Vasari's paintings in spectacles that give forth a surfeit of signs. The triumphalist art was the product of the triumphalist state, involving a large bureaucracy activated from the top to mobilize the display of intellectual, artistic, and material resources. Arts of power has deployed an eclectic range of contemporary theory to argue very persuasively that art and images are as much instruments of power as armies and taxes. Painting in the service of rulers—republican oligarchies, minor dukes or triumphalist grand dukes—does not merely reflect or illustrate ideology and power but actively contributes to their construction. Roslyn Pesman Department of History University of Sydney Wimsatt, James I., Chaucer and his French contemporaries: natural music in the fourteenth century, Toronto/Buffalo/London, University of Toronto Press, 1991; cloth; pp. xv, 378; 21 plates; R.R.P. CAN$60.00. Chaucerian scholarship lines the shelves of libraries like sets of encyclopedias. It is therefore refreshing tofinda book which takes a new approach and suggests new directions. James Wimsatt defines a link between Chaucer and four French poets of the fourteenth century which sparks thought about the definition of what it was to be a poet at this time. The reference to 'natural music' in the title draws attention to a relationship between music, performance, and the composition of literary texts. Poetry is seen to relate to both music and rhetoric, even though it may not have been composed with musical or verbal performance in mind. Wimsatt explores Chaucer's relationship to the French poets in broad outline by looking at the choice of poetic forms, and in minute detail by considering character, incident and the transfer of actual phrases. He contextualizes Chaucer's work within his career as a courtiertopresent a view of poetry as a form of diplomatic exchange between England and France. At times he seems over anxious to advance his theory of direct personal contact between Chaucer and the Frenchmen he echoed in his verse. This is particularly striking in his speculation about possible meetings between Chaucer and Guillaume de Machaut whose influence on the younger English poet he argues so convincingly elsewhere in the book. Machaut is acknowledged as the 166 Reviews greatest influence on Chaucer, both through his own verse, and through that of Jean Froissart and Eustache Deschamps. Wimsatt conjectures that the two poets might have met at the siege of Reims in 1359-60, when Chaucer was captured by the French, or in 1360 during Chaucer's visit to Calais. He stops short of claiming that 'the old poet helped to capture the young one' (p. 78), but his speculation must remain inconclusive. Indeed, the suggestion of hypothetical personal encounters or pronouncements about such things as the mutual respect that would have blossomed between Chaucer and Deschamps had they ever had the chance of meeting (p. 272), seem out of place in this work which is often so careful in its attention to observable detail. Wimsatt is at his most convincing when he is looking closely at the likenesses between Chaucer and the French poets. In addition, he raises the point that Chaucer was a translator as well as a poet, and in discussing his translation of the work of Oton de Granson, suggests to the reader the way in which the translator becomes the poet in his adaptation of the original work, thereby underlining the power of the 'natural music'. In discussing Machaut and Deschamps, Jody Enders ('Music, delivery, and the rhetoric of memory in Guillaume de Machaut's Remede de Fortune', PMLA 107 (1992), 450-64) has looked independently at the 'music' of the French poets and argued for the place of memory in medieval poetic...