Chaucerian belief: the poetics of reverence and delight (review)

Reviews 153 knowledge of the mast and sail,rightlyassuming that it is more logical to accept that they did, rather than, as is normal, that they did not. The figures on pages 18, 46, 92, 93, & 117 lack scales. That on p. 64 is unreadable. Apart from these minor points, this is an excellent book which is indispensible not only for those studying the early maritime history of northern Europe but also for anyone concerned with late-Roman and post-Roman naval and military history and the origins of the barbarian confederacies. Jonathan M.Wooding Department of History University of Sydney Hill, John M., Chaucerian belief: the poetics of reverence and delight, New Haven & London, Yale University Press, 1991; cloth; pp. xiv, 204; R.R.P. AUS$27.50. The best way to read this book might be to start at Chapter 4. It is a book I am glad to have read, but thefirstthree chapters are too hard. Hill can write with gusto, but certainly not 'lucidly and eloquently' as Traugott Lawler claims on the back cover. H e has unhappy tricks of style, including dangling modifiers, repeated locutions such as 'reverence and delight', compiled until they lose meaning, and Chaucerian words such as 'accord', 'assay', and 'affect' used in their medieval sense without inverted commas. H e piles up idiosyncratically used abstractions until some sentences lose control. Thefirstsentence on p. 22 has no main clause and the third occurrence of 'loss' in thefifthto last sentence on p. 179 is meaningless. This is a pity because Hill has two arguments that are potentially genuine contributions to the Canterbury Tales debate. Thefirstis a hypothesis that the pilgrims accept their stories as given and more or less true, and show their emotional reaction to them by their manner oftelling,their narrating voices. This seems a position worth considering, although Hill could hardly be said to have fully demonstrated it It is complicated by an argument that belief is linked to feeling, the feeling of something being right 'fit' (p. 10), in 'accord' with the perceiver (p. 22), and that Chaucer himself has 'openness of belief (p. 6 et al.). Hill does not raise the question of how the pilgrims chose their tales. W h e n applied to the tales, the hypothesis works for the Canon Yeoman's Tale, and perhaps for the Prioress's Tale and the Monk's Tale, where the readings seem perceptively Freudian. It is the treatment of these tales that is analysed, for Hill insists repeatedly that the tales themselves are not pilgrim dreams (p. 4 et al). However, this hypothesis misleads Hill, I would argue, for the Squire's Tale and Sir Thopas. It also seems to contribute and receive little, one way or another, to or from the sometimes interesting readings of the remaining five 154 Reviews tales and four early poems discussed. HU1 hardly 'demonstrates the deep-seated faith that always accompanies Chaucer's skepticism', as the dustcover claims. The second argument is a case for the centrality of the 7a/e of Melibee in Fragment VII and ultimately in the Canterbury Tales as a whole. This is surprisingly convincing. Hill isolates the real change of heart effected in Melibeus at the end of his tale. Prudence (it is never clear that Hill knows the scholastic sense of prudentia) becomes, in Hill's version of Chaucer's translation, a whole reasoned, undogmatic ethic of toleration and good feeling which may be appropriated by pilgrims and readers, so that an awkward sentence like 'Approached prudentially, fictions are not to be read angrily, covetously or hastily' in the last chapter (p. 154) does make sense. Kevin Magarey Department of English (emeritus) University of Adelaide Jankowski, Theodora A., Women in power in the Early Modern drama, Urbana & Chicago, University of Illinois Press, 1992; cloth and paper; pp. xi, 237; R.R.P. AUS$34.95 (cloth), $14.95 (paper). Women in power in the Early Modern drama is yet another product of the academic rite of passage known as 'booking one's thesis'. A n 'earlier incarnation of this book', we are warned, 'masqueraded as a doctoral dissertation'. The coyness is misplaced. This is a mediocre thesis...