Daily Life in Chaucer’s England by Jeffrey L. Singman and Will McLean (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER JEFFREY L. SINGMAN and WILL McLEAN. Daily Life in Chaucer's England. Daily Life Through History Series.London and Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1995.Pp.xii, 252.$45.0 0. From its title, this book seems a potential new option for recommended reading in advanced undergraduate or graduate classes covering either the works ofChaucer and/or his late medieval contemporaries.With its extratextual focus on the material culture of Chaucer's England, it might provide a substitute for or companion to other collections ofpre­ dominantly written source materials from the period, like Robert P. Miller's Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds, which concentrates on literary and patristic texts, or Alcuin Blamires's Woman Defamed and Woman Defended, which is perhaps too gender-limited to be an all-purpose, sup­ plementary classroom text.In their introduction, Singman and McLean themselves distinguish their book from the many others already writ­ ten about daily life in Chaucer's England, which merely "tell you what kinds ofclothes people wore, what kinds ofgames they played, or what kinds of songs they sang" (p.xi).By including "actual patterns for me­ dieval clothes, rules for medieval games, and music for medieval songs" (p.xi), their book, they argue, is the first to be written from the per­ spective of "living history," that is, the attempt "to recreate materially some aspect ofthe past" which "in its most comprehensive form ...tries to recreate an entire historical milieu" (p.x) and "encourages a hands­ on approach to the past" (p. xi). That is not only a tall order, but in terms of the physical limitations of modern classrooms and recent ex­ periments at many urban colleges and universities in "distance learn­ ing," such an approach may be, practically speaking, untenable. The authors also acknowledge that the present volume is "a revised and expanded version of The Chaucerian Handbook, . . . a manual for Chaucerian living history published by the University Medieval and Renaissance Society ofToronto in February 1991 for its 'Tabard Inn' liv­ ing history event" (p.viii).Not surprisingly, this book includes, in ap­ pendix A, advice about how a group might organize such an event and suggests that readers consult the local chapter ofthe Society for Creative Anachronism (SCA) (p.222).Indeed, Daily Life in Chaucer's England re­ sembles nothing so much as guides to "living in the current Middle Ages," such as The Known World Handbook, published for its members by the SCA.Ironically, such "popular" handbooks (and now that orga­ nization's current Internet web resources) may cover a broader spectrum oftopics about medieval life than does Singman's and McLean's book in 308 REVIEWS its chapters: Historical Background to Chaucer's England; Chaucer's World; The Course of Life; Cycles of Time; The Living Environment; Clothing and Accessories; Arms and Armor; Food and Drink; Entertainments. In addition to the patterns, musical lyrics, recipes and game rules included in Daily Life in Chaucer's England, SCA handbooks also provide illustrations of and bibliography about medieval heraldry, calligraphy, herbalism, needlework, manuscript illumination, beer­ making, jousting and tournament rules, archery, and armor-making, to name only a few aspects of medieval life offered for reasonably authen­ tic contemporary emulation. Since its "hands-on" approach does not sufficiently improve on SCA support materials, the crucial criterion for evaluation of Daily Life in Chaucer's England is its "quality of scholarship," which its authors, maintaining that they held to a "high standard of fidelity to the sources" (p. xi), claim is its other major distinction. In fact, the book's chief drawback is its dearth of scholarly documentation, averaging eleven footnotes per chapter over nine chapters, and none at all for its skimpy first chapter, which promises to cover in seven pages the "Historical Background to Chaucer's England." Some footnotes do provide cata­ logues of additional bibliographical items, often more recently pub­ lished, which are not listed in the volume's official bibliography of pri­ mary and secondary sources, novels about the period, audiovisual materials, and sources of its illustrations. This inconsistent placement of cited documentation of (or recommended further research about) life in late medieval England sometimes necessitates cumbersome cross­ searches. While...