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Reviewed by:
  • Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading the “Nun's Priest's Tale.”
  • Robert M. Stein
Peter W. Travis. Disseminal Chaucer: Rereading the “Nun's Priest's Tale.” Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2010. Pp. xii, 443. $40.00 paper.

Peter Travis has spent his career rereading Chaucer to great effect, as anyone with this journal in hand knows. His papers and many articles [End Page 371] have helped define the state of contemporary Chaucer studies. And now we have Disseminal Chaucer, a sustained rereading, or rather set of rereadings, of The Nun's Priest's Tale that will teach and delight its readers boundlessly and open up much territory for new exploration. The book is organized in seven chapters and a brief epilogue, aptly titled “Moralitas.” The chapters each take on a fundamental question about The Nun's Priest's Tale, ranging from the tale's genre, about which no consensus has developed over the course of many years of admired reading, to the great problem of its general intelligibility—what, in the last analysis, is this tale all about, or to use Chaucer's own terms, what is its sentence? What is the fruit that the reader is encouraged to take from the tale? And even, who is the reader of this tale—both the reader implied by the fiction and the actual historically possible reader—and what might the relation of that historically or aesthetically determinable reader be to the contemporary critical rereader who writes Disseminal Chaucer? To approach such questions, each chapter engages the Chaucerian text in an act of extremely close and attentive reading, what Travis calls a kind of microanalysis of a very particular moment in the tale. Very often these close analyses have been manifestly stimulated by Travis's extremely attentive readings in the history of Chaucer criticism and in the work of his contemporaries. Travis fully engages these other minds in explicit dialogue. Nowhere will one find the author shoving aside other writers in order to clear a space for his own point; rather, the contributions of others are embraced with wide-open arms, so that one of the many joys of this book is its evocation of a real community of learning and critical acumen.

While focusing tightly on very specific aspects of the text, Travis's method of close reading also opens out into a vastly erudite consideration of the intellectual context of The Nun's Priest's Tale. As he sees it, this context is a creation of the medieval system of education, a cultural possession held in common by Chaucer and any of his conceivable contemporary readers. And Travis argues that since the educational system is, by way of parody, a central preoccupation of the text itself, this intellectual context is also a fundamental component of the text's content. We access the world “outside” the text through the textual operations themselves, not the least significant implication of Derrida's usually misunderstood assertion, “il n’y a pas de hors-texte.” And Travis's discussion of this material is immensely learned, detailed, clear, thorough, and smart. [End Page 372]

Travis first of all proposes that The Nun's Priest's Tale is Chaucer's ars poetica—a sustained meditation on the process of poetry and its intellectual and cultural setting within the institution of the curriculum of the artes. Thus The Nun's Priest's Tale also provides its readers a gateway to the Canterbury Tales taken as a whole, and indeed to the fundamentals of Chaucer's creative artistry. Its genre is menippean satire most broadly construed. Such a generic identification, as Travis argues convincingly, allies The Nun's Priest's Tale with examples as far distant from it and from each other in style and aim as The Satyricon, The Anatomy of Melancholy, and Candide. In this definition, “satire” possesses its etymological meaning, from satura, of a stew of wildly different things—indeed, in the more narrow definition, the mixture in question is merely that of prose and verse, as in The Consolation of Philosophy. To avoid confusion, Travis rejects “satire” out of hand, preferring to call the genre in question “menippean parody,” where the object...

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