Chaucer and the Mystics: The Canterbury Tales and the Genre of Devotional Prose by Robert Boenig (review)

REVIEWS Nineveh, which did heed the danger" (p.25).The pursuit ofsimilari­ ties also leads the authors astray when they attempt to link God's sym­ pathy with people "who do not know one hand from the other" in Patience with Gawain's choice to strike the Green Knight with the axe rather than the holly bob which the Green Knight carried in his other hand: "Presumably, then, Gawain could have wielded the holly sprig as a weapon. Certainly, then, his fetching of a "dunt as [he } hat3 dalt' ...would have been a less somber affair" (pp.10 5-6).This indeed "challenges accepted interpretations," as the publisher's blurb prom­ ises, but whether or not it will dislodge them will depend on our will­ ingness to take seriously the possibility ofa romance in which a knight goes in quest ofa monster who is armed with a green holly-bob. Such occasional lapses ofjudgment by no means invalidate the over­ all thesis that the works of the Gawain-poet intersect in fascinating ways; but they do raise the question ofwhether the intersection is quite ofthe kind that the authors imagine. AD PUTTER University ofBristol Robert Boenig.Chaucer and the Mystics: The Canterbury Tales and the Genre of Devotional Prose. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 199 5.Pp.231.$37.50. I am not, as a rule, overly fond ofexegetical readings ofChaucer, nor of critical approaches that view Chaucer as primarily a religious writer.I was never overly sympathetic to Robertsonianism during its heyday. But every now and then a work comes along that forces me to go back and take a long, hard look at my own critical assumptions about the re­ lationships between secular and religious texts in the Middle Ages. Robert Hanning's 1982essay on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, "Sir Gawain and The Red Herring: The Perils oflnterpretation" (in MaryJ. Carruthers and Elizabeth D.Kirk, eds. , Acts ofInterpretation: The Text in Its Contexts, 700-1600 (Norman: Pilgrim,1982}), was one such work; Robert Boenig's Chaucer and the Mystics is another.What I found most attractive and persuasive in Boenig's claim that Chaucer drew on mys­ tical writings to shape The Canterbury Tales is his refusal to reduce all 227 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER readings of Chaucer to one mystical reading, as the exegetical critics of the 1960s so often did with patristics. Instead, his introduction doubly contextualizes his readings of The Canterbury Tales. He locates them within the interpretive communities available to the contemporary Chaucer scholar (New Criticism, exegesis, reader response, the New Historicism), and he locates Chaucer's own practices of reading and writing within the interpretive communities of which he himself was a member and within which his work circulated. Readings of Chaucer that draw upon mystical writings are made more plausible, for instance, by Chaucer's friendship with John Clanvowe and Lewis Clifford, both known for their interest in mysticism, and by the independent circula­ tion of The Parson's Tale in a manuscript anthology of devotional texts (Longleat 29) that included works by Richard Rolle and Walter Hilton. Chaucer and the Mystics argues that The Canterbury Tales shares with mystical writing a tendency simultaneously to affirm and deny ideas, language, and even reality. This dynamic of affirmation and denial not only elucidates particular passages or tales, but the peculiar architecton­ ics of The Canterbury Tales itself and particularly the failure of control that causes the text to lapse into fragmentation and ultimately silence (p. 11). Boenig bases his claim on theories of language articulated by Pseudo­ Dionysius, a fifth- or sixth-century Syrian monk, and reiterated by late medieval mystical writers. The aporia created by this persistent paradox, this affirmation and denial of language, results in increasing fragmenta­ tion, until the mystical writer simply falls silent before the inexpressible ineffability of the Godhead. This approach serves Boenig well in dealing with those tales that make explicit use of mystical themes: it provides enough material for two chapters on The Prioress's Tale, which are the most illuminating in the book. Equally productive are the discussions of the Parson's relatively straightforward sermon and the parodies of mys­ tical knowledge...