Chaucer and Fame: Reputation and Reception ed. by Isabel Davis and Catherine Nall (review)

Chaucer and Fame: Reputation and Reception, a collection of essays edited by Isabel Davis and Catherine Nall, comprehensively explores the central idea of fame, or fama, as it arises within Chaucer’s poems and pertains to the poet’s afterlife. The theme of surviving time permeates the speeches of Chaucer’s characters and connects his poems to medieval works including Dante’s Commedia and Petrarch’s Rerum vulgarium fragmenta, but these essays primarily demonstrate how later readers, authors, manuscript compilers, and printers perpetuated and shaped Chaucer’s name and reputation. Chaucer and Fame appeals essentially to scholars of Chaucer; however, the focus on intertextual dialogues and reception, multilingualism, and book history also make this collection a significant contribution to the scholarship of medieval literature and medievalism.

The eleven chapters of Chaucer and Fame reflect a wide range of topics pertaining to Chaucer’s works and posthumous fame, and address a variety of historical, biographical, and cultural contexts, but Davis justifies this breadth by stressing Chaucer’s own complex engagement with literature, ancient and medieval. The volume aims to investigate not an independent Chaucer, whose works are to be read in a literary vacuum, but rather a “diachronic and international exchange,” considering how Chaucer imagines himself in relation to classical auctores, as well as French and Italian medieval authors, including Dante and Petrarch, who frequently obsessed over their connection to figures like Virgil and Ovid, and gave Chaucer material for his exploration of fama (2). For one, Davis’s introduction considers how, in The Legend of Good Women, Chaucer not only recognizes the canonical positions of Virgil and Ovid, eliciting concerns with celebrity found in Chaucer’s earlier dream vision The House of Fame, but also intervenes in the two ancient poets’ dispute over Dido’s reputation. Recognizing Chaucer’s object in the Legend to fix the reputations of legendary women, Davis emphasizes authorial omission and inclusion in a useful context that prepares for the subsequent essays in the volume.

For a discussion of the preoccupation with presence and absence in the “making” of Chaucer, Davis points to the essays by Andrew Galloway and Thomas Prendergast. Considering the idea that “absence…defines and even makes possible the idea of celebrity,” Prendergast explores “the transition of the invented textual presence of Chaucer in the late Middle Ages to the invented personal presence of the poet in the early modern period” (186). He persuasively argues that while the Middle Ages construed Chaucer’s celebrity through the invention of the text, as indicated by the gaps and fill-ins within the manuscript tradition, early modern writers more blatantly resurrected Chaucer’s person, marking this latter period as the era in which “an ur-culture of celebrity took hold” and in which “the poet himself began to make a quasi-appearance in literary works” (192). In Galloway’s examination of the Lancastrian reception of Chaucer, the image of a penitential Chaucer calls attention to the ways in which fifteenth-century readers legitimized English poetry and opens into compelling readings of early poetic laments on Chaucer’s death and representations of his life and identity.

Mike Rodman Jones’s essay, “Chaucer the Puritan,” also investigates the shift of reception between pre- and post-Reformation England, first demonstrating how Chaucer’s name in the Renaissance gave cultural weight and authority to various projects and suggesting the role that the early modern period assigned Chaucer in the religious conflicts of early English Protestantism, but primarily making the case for the idea that “our sense of what ‘Reformed’ or ‘Protestant Chaucer’ was has to be alive to the shifting ground, the fragmentation, diversity and complexity of ecclesiastical controversy in this most controversial of religious and historical periods” (168). Jones’s compelling argument in this essay challenges the simplification of religious terminologies and absolute, monolithic categorizations of early modern religions, and brings to light some of the more interesting citations of Chaucer in Tudor and Stuart texts, beyond those that a...