Fallible Authors: Chaucer’s Pardoner and Wife of Bath (review)

Alastair Minnis has few competitors among intellectual historians treating late medieval England, and none in the fields of literary scholarship. That does not mean that he has devoted more or deeper attention to medieval English literature itself than anyone around him. Instead, he has long focused on the concerns of “medieval literary criticism.” That is, he has examined either what medieval academic or other learned commentary has to offer on topics of narrative form and purpose, authority, and authorship, especially in the Bible or ancient literature (in the charting of which Minnis made his name in the 1980s and 1990s), or the explicit use of such ideas by vernacular writers. A commitment to literature’s thematic effects in themselves and its contextual meanings more generally defined—not to mention the modern critical debates that have sprung up around it—seems to come second. In Fallible Authors, though, Chaucer’s two most famous figures are the capstone or portal of a magnificent edifice that will serve to orient a wide range of studies of other medieval writers and thinkers.

In this, his most magisterial study so far, Minnis traces the complex topic of how “authority” possessed two “bodies” in medieval culture (with a fittingly appreciative nod to Ernst Kantorowicz’s 1957 study The King’s Two Bodies, which “retains much of its original challenge” [10]): that of the transcendent moral utility of doctrine (or the salvific power of the sacraments), and that of the frail human vehicle of such higher forces. The broad terms of such a history—to offer an overly simplified capsule of Minnis’s discussion—are that an earlier Augustinian insistence on the supreme force of the sacraments, no matter how sinful the human priest purveying them, encountered powerful resistance from resurgent Aristotelian traditions in the thirteenth century. Aristotelianism put far more weight on the human origins of authority, and began to treat artifice, verbal and other, as a separate thing from moral utility, with its own intrinsic (if therefore amoral) value. The focus on the human agent of sacramentality in turn helped create extreme Lollard positions in Chaucer’s period that resembled the views of the early Donatists (Augustine’s own antagonists), who claimed that the power of sacramentality or of a sermon was only as good as the moral worth of the human agent. Minnis traces the paradoxes of the treatments of these issues in the later Middle Ages in two domains: sinful clerics’ moral sermons could still be spiritually efficacious, thanks to the transformative authority of priestly ordination itself; yet there remained a residual problem in the taint of scandal, which was managed in various awkward ways by orthodox commentary. At the same time, bodily gender still trumped moral discourse: even the highest doctrine offered by an old woman—conceived as the lowest creature of all, according to Minnis—could not achieve real authority.

Chaucer’s two most famous figures, of course, epitomize and offer the opportunity for exploring the limit-cases of these questions, whose contemporary importance was at crisis point during the challenges of Lollardy in the 1390s, when Chaucer was writing. But intellectual history itself is the real star of this study. The two issues are woven and developed into an invaluable survey of what must be seen as the central paradoxes of late medieval ecclesiology and the grounds for the violent resolutions of the Reformation. And throughout the demonstration appears the question of how two such contradictory views of doctrinal authority’s supremacy and a bodily, gendered barrier might coexist. That contradiction finds its clearest but not necessarily its most literarily supportive resolution in Lollardy, at whose intellectual strands Minnis’s study offers the mostly finely grained look in recent years. Fallible Authors also offers at least glimpses of other key topics, as much cultural as literary or intellectual. The topic of “scandal,” for example, here receives one of its best cameo histories I know of. For in spite of...