Chaucer's Dream Visions: Courtliness and Individual Identity (review)

Reviews 231 St John, Michael, Chaucer's Dream Visions: Courtliness and Individual Identity (Studies in European Cultural Transition), Aldershot, Ashgate, 2000; boards; pp. viii, 226; R R P £45.00; ISBN 0754601226. This volume is another in the series Studies in European Cultural Transition, w is, in the words of its General Editors, 'explicitly European and interdisciplinary, concentrating attention on the relativity ofcultural perspectives, with a particular interest in issues ofcultural transition'. The author's approach certainly embodies both the European and the interdisciplinary requirements of that prescription, seeking to read Chaucer's dream poems against the background of Latin, French, and Italian influences and source material, and from a perspective that is informed as much by Aristotelian and scholastic epistemology as it is by traditional literary study. After an introduction of some 20 pages, St John works through each of Chaucer's four dream poems in turn, in order, as he expresses it in his conclusion 'to explore the relationship between the mind of the individual subject, and the various dimensions ofcourtliness it encounters and negotiates' (p. 206). This is a difficult book to respond to. In the chapters that deal with individual poems, there is much with which readers of Chaucer's dream poems would readily agree. St John focusses perceptively on the importance of courtliness and the courtly identity, stressing, in particular, the ways in which the individual is shaped by and within a culture context - in this case, a context that is overtly textual. His declared opposition to 'the idea of a non-subjective medieval identity' is a welcome corrective to the privileging of the Early M o d e m period by some of its interpreters. Equally valuable is the attention to Chaucer's intellectual sources in Boethius, Alanus, Dante, and Machaut. There is a useful suggestion that the Parliament of Fowls might be read against the background ofthe Good Parliament, and the ways in which Chaucer explores and analyzes the language offine amour are also well discussed here. But for all that, this is ultimately a book that fails to satisfy, for I believe its central thesis is mistaken. What distinguishes this study of courtly identity is the author's belief that, under the influence of Aristotelian psychology, Chaucer divides the mind of the courtly subject, describing one part that is shaped and determined from without and another that is unshaped and self-determining. These two parts of the courtier's identity he equates in turn with Aristotle's receptive and active intellects. A s a necessary preliminary, St John provides a brief summary of Aristotle's teaching on cognition from De Anima, and of Aristotle's ideas on dreams from Parva Naturalia. 232 Reviews The passage in De Anima in which Aristotle deals with active intellect and receptive (passive) intellect is very brief, but notoriously difficult, and has givenriseto considerable debate - so much so, that several recent commentators acknowledge this as the single most difficult problem ofAristotelian psychology. The underlying problem is to determine h o w the rational soul comes to know anything of the external world - in philosophical terms, how the immaterial mind can receive a representation (necessarily also immaterial) of a material object. It was in response to this that Aristotle developed his much-disputed theory of nous poietikos and nous pathetikos. Interpretations ofAristotle (that ofAquinas is probably the most important) have often been quite extreme. Some have read the active and passive as two separate intellects, one perishable, the other permanent; some describe them as 'components' ofthe human mind, almost as ifthey had separate physical status; others insist that they are capacities of the mind. It is a problem that continues to receive extensive treatment by classicists and historians ofphilosophy, but nothing ofthat debate and disagreement is reflected here. The only secondary source that appears to have been used in the discussion is that ofW.A. H a m m o n d (1902) - a work that does not appear in any of the two dozen analyses of De Anima I consulted. In short, the treatment of active and passive intellect provided here, and elsewhere in the book, simplifies and distorts Aristotle's complexity. One such distortion is contained...