The Fabliau in English by John Hines (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER and literary analysis of a moderately theoretical kind. For such yoking of two approaches it requires more rigorous conceptualization and more pre­ cise scholarship. A final comment: the bibliography is only a small selection of the pri­ mary and secondary sources extensively cited in the endnotes, making it difficult to track them down. DHIRA B. MAHONEY Arizona State University JOHN HINES. The Fabliau in English. Longman Medieval and Renaissance Library. London and New York: Longman, 1993. Pp. xii, 316. $68.95 cloth, $25.95 paper. This book is part of a series, says the back cover, "designed particularly to meet the needs of students and the general reader," emphasizing "breadth and variety of coverage." Hines's announced procedure is to favor descrip­ tion over definition, and he invokes Jauss as support for an approach to the fabliau that will give due recognition to expansions and changes in the genre and to differences among fabliaux of different languages. Chapter 1 discusses the Old French corpus and covers all the bases. Hines follows Schenk in treating the basic plot pattern as one of deception and misdeed. He smoothly incorporates (and thus domesticates) Bloch's concerns with linguistic slipperiness and obscenity into a more Muscati­ nian reading of the fabliaux as evoking a world powered by sensory drives. The often uneasy relationship between story and moral, he argues, asks the reader not to ironize or ignore either component completely but to recog­ nize simultaneously the strength (and pleasures) of appetite, Christian mo­ rality, and the problems of literary moralization. The end of the chapter focuses on French fabliaux in England, particularly Anglo-Norman tales as a recognizable subset of the genre. The second chapter discusses Dame Sirith, "the only extant Middle En­ glish fabliau by an author other than Chaucer" (p. 43), making a detailed case for the sophistication of this story, particularly its success in character­ ization through the use of conventional courtly love language juxtaposed with less elevated diction. Hines argues that the closely related Interludium de clerico et puella has a more sharply anticlerical focus. Then follows a 214 REVIEWS discussion of The Shipman's Tale, focusing on the difficulty of determining which of its characters is the typical "target figure" victimized in fabliaux. The "moral indeterminacy and neutrality" of the tale (p. 90) suggests that Chaucer is problematizing the stock anticlerical, antifeminist, or anti­ mercantile features ofthe genre; Hines links this metaliterary dimension to the placing of The Shipman's Tale in fragment VIl(G), where there is a constant exploration of the dynamics and disjunctions among tale, teller, and genre. In this context the story's amorality becomes "a form of immo­ rality" (p. 104) and thus a comment on fabliau itself. Chaucer's contextualizing of fabliau also plays a large role in the fourth chapter's analysis of the Miller's and the Reeve's stories. Hines argues against the widespread tendency to read the two tales and tellers as dia­ metric opposites, finding that both contain a good deal of sophisticated play that challenges the notion of their tellers as merely crude churls and thus of stereotyping by class. He sees a "clerkly" dimension in the humor of both (pp. 122, 135) consistent with the "clerkly" tone of the genre in Old French (pp. 25-27) and a number ofintertextual continuities between the two. Hines also critiques the conventional reading of The Miller's Tale simply as a parody of The Knight's Tale. He finds parallels as well as differ­ ences between the romance and the fabliaux in fragment I(A) and argues that the principal effect of their juxtaposition is to show "the subjectivity of social norms," t�e social and literary construction of "knightliness" or "churlishness" (p. 1'52). The Cook's Tale ends abruptly when it introduces the fabliau word "swyved" into the moralism ofthe immediately preceding .lines, a generic befuddlement that contrasts with the previous tellers' more self-aware conformity to cultural expectations. Chapter 5 treats the Summoner's and the Merchant's tales as experi­ ments with the fabliau. The former moves the genre's anticlericalism more firmly into satire; the latter moves its...