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Reviewed by:
  • Chaucer and Religion
  • Alan J. Fletcher
Helen Phillips, ed. Chaucer and Religion. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2010. Pp. xix, 216. £55.00; $95.00.

An understanding of how Chaucer the man related to the religious culture of his day is something we are never likely to attain: his personal stance in this area seems beyond reach. The title of this book therefore proves to be something of a tease. That Chaucer was born into a culture routinely aware of and alive to the pulse of Christian tradition and its obligations is self-evident, and Helen Cooper, in a masterly overview of the topic and introduction to the essays that follow, makes a similar point. So what remains if the ostensible topic of the book is in fact elusive? What we have here is largely a series of individual approaches to different aspects of late medieval Christianity and piety as these are refracted in Chaucer's poetry.

While each study in Chaucer and Religion is coherent within its own terms, cumulatively the essays seem nevertheless to amount to an eclectic mix. The final impression conveyed by the volume is that its insights—and there are many for which to be grateful—arise locally but are not orchestrated as an integrated ensemble. This being so, they too give the lie to the book's title to the extent that this may be taken to suggest that the promised account of Chaucer and religion will be a fully coordinated one. Thus, since the volume has no overarching argument, [End Page 363] little injustice will be done to it by listing its contributions serially here, although limitations on space necessarily mean that some will unjustly receive too short a shrift.

Alcuin Blamires considers the topic of love, marriage, sex, and gender in Chaucer's writing, and restores to our present-day comprehension of these things an awareness of the values with which they came freighted in the later fourteenth century. This is a useful essay and impeccably informed. Like a number of others in the volume, its scope is broad, its examples selected from anywhere within the Chaucerian corpus. Unfortunately, the next essay, by Graham D. Caie, does not sustain the initial promise and interest of Blamires. Caie writes on the topic of Chaucer and the Bible, rehearsing conventional knowledge about the currency of biblical versions in Chaucer's day. When he cites the essay that follows his own, that by Frances M. McCormack on the subject of Chaucer and Lollardy, it appears that he has not actually read it closely, for contrary to Caie (25), there is evidence that Chaucer knew the Wycliffite Bible translation, nor is McCormack unaware of it (37). Her own essay, well informed though very brief, leaves the reader wanting to hear more on this important topic. Stephen Knight comes next with the first of two chapters that he has contributed, this one on Chaucer's treatment of the Church and churls, while Anthony Bale follows with an account of what the terms “Jew” and “Muslim” meant within the Canterbury Tales.

Like Knight, the editor of the volume, Helen Phillips, has also contributed two chapters, and both show a critic working at the height of her powers. The first considers the “matter” of Chaucer, his thematic preoccupations and their intersections with Christianity. It ranges effortlessly in search of supporting examples throughout the oeuvre. Next, Sherry Reames writes well on the cult of the saints in Chaucer, and shows him to have resisted the tendency of the hagiographic genre to simplify complex moral and theological issues. Carl Phelpstead treats questions of death and judgment in Chaucer, and is followed by Laurel Broughton, who adds further thoughts on the topic of Chaucer and the saints. Dee Dyas writes on medieval notions of pilgrimage. In his second chapter for the volume, Stephen Knight illustrates what he perceives to be a complex tension in Chaucer's dream poems between the predominantly classical and secular domain of their subject matter and an off-stage Christian voice that repeatedly questions that subject matter. The second chapter of Helen Phillips concludes the series of studies proper, and is as impressive as was her first...

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