In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • Chaucer from Prentice to Poet: The Metaphor of Love in Dream Visions and Troilus and Criseyde
  • Michael Foster
Chaucer from Prentice to Poet: The Metaphor of Love in Dream Visions and Troilus and Criseyde. By Edward I. Condren. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008. Pp. xiv + 239; 8 illustrations. $59.95.

This review must begin with a disclaimer: in 1998, I attended Edward I. Condren's seminar on the Pearl poet at UCLA, where he presented the numerological theory that became the foundation of his monograph published in 2002, The Numerical Universe of the "Gawain-Pearl" Poet: Beyond Phi. I was extremely skeptical of the approach then, and Condren's newest book, on Chaucer's literary corpus excluding The Canterbury Tales, further cements my doubt.

In the first chapter of the book, Condren affirms that he will "examine the texts of these poems very closely to understand the dynamic ways they use to reach their resolutions and the connections they make to Chaucer's progress as a poet" (p. 7). Thus Condren is radically traditional—he believes that a single critic, armed with sufficient historical context and a keen sensitivity, can find the poet's aesthetic accomplishments with relative ease. This dependence on the critic's sensitive humanity, however, makes for thoroughly unconvincing and faulty arguments. Thus Condren asks rhetorically, about the Black Knight of Book of the Duchess, "Does it not also strain credulity to suppose that Chaucer would imagine Gaunt, England's second most prominent hunter after his father, preferring to sit on the ground, lean against a tree, and compose a pedestrian poem, rather than join a manly hunt nearby?" (p. 26). From this, Condren concludes that the Black Knight most certainly does not represent Gaunt, and is a reflection of the poet himself—a theory first presented in two articles by Condren in The Chaucer Review in 1971 and 1975. Condren ignores how potentially offensive Chaucer's self-promotion to a knight may have been, yet he is confident that he understands Chaucer's motivations in writing this poem, the political machinations of fourteenth-century culture, and the structural experimentations of medieval poets.

However, his conclusions make me less confident in his abilities. In Chapter 2, we are told that Book of the Duchess is not only a conversation between two Chaucers—an older one (the narrator) and a younger one (the Black Knight)—but was originally written as a tribute to Queen Philippa and was later adapted to become a memorial for Blanche of Lancaster. Condren notes that the Man of Law calls it a story of Ceyx and Alcyone, and affirms that it was sometime after this that "Chaucer apparently began thinking of the poem as related to the duchess" (p. 9), although, by all accounts, The Man of Law's Tale surely postdates Book of the Duchess and Blanche's death by more than a decade and may reflect the Man of Law's reading habits, as has been suggested by many Chaucerians. Condren pounces on Chaucer's oft-noticed presumption to console Gaunt, a substantial social superior, and suggests that no tangible connection between Chaucer and Gaunt can explain Chaucer's motivations for writing the poem. In fact, the Hat-field Christmas of 1357 was "the most plausible occasion for Chaucer to have 'met' Gaunt," but the two probably did not meet during that celebration—after [End Page 130] all, Gaunt had little reason to spend much time with an "insignificant page in his early teens" (p. 28). This is convincing, but it does not support Condren's main argument that the two were too distant for Chaucer to have written such an intimate poem, especially since Condren ignores Katherine Swynford and the personal social context that existed between Gaunt and Chaucer from ca. 1368–69 to the nobleman's death.

Next, Condren focuses on the Parliament of Fowls and uncovers in it "a rich compositional strategy" (p. 64) that is visual, spatial, and geometric. This leads Condren to count stanzas and find mathematical structures within the poem. Thus the first tercel eagle is given four stanzas, the second gets two, and the third gets three. Condren insists that "these...

pdf

Share