Chaucerian Aesthetics (review)

In recent years, there has emerged a growing interest among literary scholars in returning to the questions of aesthetics and form that historicism, in its various guises, seemed to neglect or willfully exclude. This return usually has been accomplished in one of two ways: either the critic begins with theories of the aesthetic and proceeds to the literary text, or the critic engages in some kind of close scrutiny of the text and its engagement with (or construction of) aesthetic and formal categories like "beauty" or "genre" or "character" or "style." Peggy Knapp takes the first route, opening her Chaucerian Aesthetics with two wide-ranging considerations of aesthetic theory, both medieval and post-Enlightenment, including thinkers like Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventure, Kant, Wittgenstein, Gadamer, and Scarry, as well as cognitive theorists like Antonio Damasio and Daniel Dennett. These opening accounts guide the more thematic readings of Chaucer's poetry that follow in five wide-ranging chapters. The theoretical approach has many advantages, not the least of which is its capacity to articulate Chaucerian practice—the various ways in which Chaucer deploys aesthetic devices and forms. This approach can also make connections among the aesthetic values of the distant past, the recent past, and the present day, creating connective tissue that firmly links Augustine and Aquinas to Kant, Wittgenstein, and others. Knapp foregrounds this potential of aesthetic theory by frequently performing a kind of translatio on the aesthetic values she derives from medieval thinkers—as she does, for instance, with the term claritas, which she links to Elaine Scarry's notion of "greeting," the welcome that beauty extends to the viewer. Knapp's goal seems to be to create a network of interwoven aesthetic features, held together across time by this translatio, within which she can situate Chaucer's poetry in order to establish the fundamentally transhistorical nature of its generosity and openness—its capacity to speak to readers in the past and in the present. Along the way, she prosecutes various literary critical arguments, addressing both local questions of interpretation and larger disputes about the nature of the literary text itself.

It would be impossible in a short review to survey adequately the formidable array of aesthetic categories and concepts that Knapp deploys in her interpretations of Chaucer's poetry. She begins with medieval categories like verisimilitude, integritas (formal coherence), proportionality, claritas (luminosity), and usefulness (for moral reasoning), and joins them to notions like "epistemic hunger" (from Dennett), "aspect formation" and the "language game" (from Wittgenstein), "capacious regard" and "greeting" (from Scarry), the "luminous detail" (from Pound), and "free delight" (from Kant). The sheer volume of ideas at work here is at once impressive and destabilizing. It is always a severe challenge to distill the philosophical thought of many centuries into a short space, and Knapp is to be congratulated for her remarkable account of aesthetics from the Middle Ages to the present. As an introduction to a book titled Chaucerian Aesthetics, however, this pastiche of ideas comes dangerously close to muddying the waters, threatening to overwhelm what should be at the core of the book: Chaucer's own notion of the aesthetic as it is expressed in his vocabulary, use of aesthetic devices, and references to aesthetic concepts like the imagination or, most famously, "sentence and solaas." Because each of the thinkers referenced emerges from a slightly different philosophical tradition, with different vocabularies and definitions, different trajectories and goals, the result of Knapp's extensive citation can be confusion. The substitution of modern terms for medieval categories seems in this light to neglect the contexts in which the vocabulary on both sides of the divide was forged, contexts that reveal much about how aesthetics was understood at different moments in history. Given the rich and nuanced language for describing the imagination in the Middle Ages—so elegantly articulated by Knapp—one wonders why it is necessary to seek terms from different historical moments in order to explain how Chaucer viewed his own relationship to the sensible. Understanding how he negotiated this "language...