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  • Chaucer's Visions of Manhood
  • Isabel Davis
Holly A. Crocker. Chaucer's Visions of Manhood. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Pp. xiii, 250. $80.00.

The obstacle in the path of any historical study of men and masculinity is the same as that in the path of women's studies: masculine universality. Textual studies of medieval masculinity must also negotiate a number of other impediments. As is well known, the use of masculine pronouns as a default, along with the lack of gendered inflections in Middle English, and the frequent anonymity of texts in manuscript cultures, all too regularly obscure the roles that we know women must have played in their worlds. It also, however, naturalizes men, causing them to recede as an object of study. So that when scholars turn to focus on men, they can, bafflingly, evade observation precisely through a masculine covering of feminine influence and agency, of gender difference. As Thelma Fenster pithily observed, in the introduction to one of the earliest publications on medieval masculinities: “Although the subjects of traditional historical discourse were for the most part men, that discourse was still not precisely about men” (Medieval Masculinities, ed. Lees, 1994). But it is apparent, too, that straightforwardly rewriting the grand narratives of history as, more specifically, the history of men will not do. This is because [End Page 321] those narratives do not reliably get the Middle Ages right, so that the histories of masculinity that are predicated on them, however inadvertently, describe medieval masculinity as primitive and uncomplicated, as a nonsubject. Masculinity is both everywhere and nowhere and medieval masculinity seems especially adept at slipping in and out of view; the problem of how scholarship should approach something that is both dominant and decentered has never been resolved.

Holly A. Crocker's Chaucer's Visions of Manhood skillfully circumnavigates this obstacle, transforming the problems of study into its research object. The “Visions” of Crocker's title is used in its most specific senses; this is a study of seeing, both with the bodily and the mind's eye. This enables a head-on assessment of how gender—whether masculinity or femininity—can be looked at both in its own time and in modern scholarship. What emerges is an account not only of the past but also our relation to it, of what can be seen, studied, and said about gender in the Middle Ages. Chapter 1 opens with an account of medieval theories of optics, settling on Baconian intromission as a way to refuse easy equations between seeing and agency, between passivity and the object. The subsequent readings of Chaucer then connect up a number of different themes relating to the visible and the invisible, treating, for example, the absent author, secrecy, privacy, coverture, images, passing and the mundane. Chaucer himself, according to Crocker, is the ultimate invisible man, covering himself with personae and retraccioun. “Chaucer refuses to own, inhabit, or animate his works in a fully visible fashion,” she concludes (151). At the end of the book, the Ovidian tale of Ceyx and Alcyone, which Chaucer embeds in The Book of the Duchess, is ingeniously offered as a synecdoche for the ways in which later manuscript compilers and readers, responding to Chaucer's absence in his verse, reanimated the Chaucerian corpus, presenting a vision that is at turns recognizable and unrecognizable as Chaucer.

The themes of sight and visibility are discovered across a number of Chaucer's texts and not those that one might expect. In Chaucer's oeuvre, the idea of the gaze has been most thoroughly explored in relation to Troilus and Criseyde, by Sarah Stanbury and others, and this study sensibly chooses some territory less traveled. While The Wife of Bath's Prologue is to be expected in a gender study of Chaucer, Crocker otherwise makes some surprising choices: the enigmatic Tale of Melibee, The Physician's Tale, The Shipman's Tale, and The Book of the Duchess. Her last chapter looks at the place of Chaucer in British Library, Harley MS [End Page 322] 7333, a mid-fifteenth-century poetry anthology, which contains a copy of the Canterbury Tales. But Crocker's analysis of that manuscript...

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