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Reviewed by:
  • Temporal Circumstances: Form and History in the “Canterbury Tales.”, and: Acts of Recognition: Essays on Medieval Culture
  • Elizabeth Scala
Lee Patterson. Temporal Circumstances: Form and History in the “Canterbury Tales.” New York: Palgrave, 2006. Pp. xi, 288. $80.00.
Lee Patterson. Acts of Recognition: Essays on Medieval Culture. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Pp. xii, 356. $38.00 paper.

Lee Patterson has written some of the very best Chaucer criticism of the past generation, a fact that whets our appetite for these two collections of essays. Acts of Recognition and Temporal Circumstances consist almost entirely of previously published material, with the exception of a chapter on Troilus and Criseyde in Acts of Recognition and the introduction to Temporal Circumstances. Part memoir and part manifesto, this introduction details Patterson's thoughts on “Historicism and Postmodernism,” [End Page 356] somewhat revising the opinions he formulated in “On the Margin: Post-modernism, Ironic History, and Medieval Studies” (Speculum 65 [1990]: 87–108). The first of these two collections, Temporal Circumstances, reprints the Matthews Lectures on the Wife of Bath, which Patterson gave at Birkbeck College, London, as the first two chapters; there are two essays originally published in SAC: one on Chaucer's tales of Thopas and Melibee, the other on The Canon's Yeoman's Tale; these appear alongside his well-known Speculum essay on The Pardoner's Tale, an essay from JMEMS on The Prioress's Tale, and an essay on The Clerk's Tale originally published in a festschrift for Elizabeth Kirk. The more recent volume, Acts of Recognition, offers no introduction or contextualization for its collection of more eclectic materials. Here Patterson reprints an often-cited chapter of Negotiating the Past on Historical Criticism and its relation to Exegetics; a pedagogy essay first published in Exemplaria; two essays on Hoccleve, one of which first appeared in SAC; essays on Lydgate, Clanvowe, Chaucer and the complaint, the gaze, the heroic laconic style, and, finally, an essay on Franciscanism and the natural world. Most of these essays originally appeared in collections of one kind or another. Space does not permit me to summarize these eighteen chapters, nor to give each its due attention, but it is possible to provide an assessment of the cumulative weight of these materials.

Temporal Circumstances's introduction situates the historicism Patterson has consistently practiced in a long history of Chaucerian interpretation. Such command of the field is one of Patterson's strengths as a scholar, and it makes reading his books a pleasure. His prose is striking and his argument engaging. But his version of history can also be a source of frustration for its willful and at times stubborn prejudices (a mounting animosity to feminism, psychoanalysis, and most poststructuralist thinking—even that from which he benefits). Thankfully, and somewhat self-consciously, Patterson makes these prejudices clear by laying out the lines of his thought. His definition of the historicism to which he adheres is nicely put in his pedagogy essay from Acts of Recognition: “Historicism wants to understand nothing less than what Chaucer meant when he wrote his poems, what the poems meant to the society within which they circulated, and—at a higher level of abstraction—how the poems connect not just to the self-aware intentions of the poet and the explicit expectations of his audience but to larger patterns of social practice and ideology” (“Disenchanted Classroom,” 46). Such articulation makes Patterson's reliance on empiricism and his often positivistic [End Page 357] proclivities clear; not that there's anything wrong with that. But he is also far less patient with critics who are after different textual effects: “for the new-fangled multiculturalist or feminist or queer theorist or postcolonialist, [art] is valuable because it provides a privileged vehicle for the appreciation of culturally determined identities” (Temporal Circumstances, 8). Thus while he calls for a most sophisticated and subtle form of historicism, he positions everything else as simpleminded and mere fashion.

One might be tempted to read Temporal Circumstances as a continuation of Chaucer and the Subject of History 1991, surely Patterson's best and most influential book. Subject of History set an entire generation of scholars to...

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