The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question (review)

250 Reviews medieval cultural concepts and changing attitudes. Readers will have to judge their validity for deepening understanding of the Middle Ages. GlynnisM. Cropp School ofLanguage Studies Massey University Koff, Leonard Michael and Brenda Deen Schildgen, eds., The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question, London, Associated University Presses, 2000; cloth; pp. 352; R R P £42.50; ISBN 0838638007. The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales comprises a Foreword by Giuseppe Mazzotta, an Introduction by Leonard Michael Koff, essays by 11 scholars, an Afterword by David Wallace, a bibliography, and a full index. It thus has all the markings of a major contribution to a field of study that has been remarkably productive in recent years, thanks in large part to Wallace's 1997 book Chaucerian Polity. But that contribution is decidedly more modest than one might have expected. To be sure, those interested in Chaucer's response to Italy will find much of great interest here - that is inevitable in a 300-plus page collection of essays, including some by major scholars - but the book is hampered by the 'oldness' of its governing questions. A more accurate title for the book would have been simply The Canterbury Tales and Boccaccio. One of the entries, Richard Neuse's 'The Monk's De casibus: The Boccaccio Case Reopened,' has nothing to do with the Decameron; that work is subordinate in James H. M c Gregor's 'The Knight's Tale and Trecent Italian Historiography' as well. A bigger problem is the nature of the 'old question' mentioned in the subtitle, which refers not to Chaucer's failure to mention Boccaccio, but to the extent of his knowledge of The Decameron. The opening salvo comes from Peter G. Beidler: 'Just Say Yes,' his title enjoins, 'Chaucer Knew the Decameron'. Yet the other essays tend to take the safer route, as in Schildgen's remark that '[w]hile these similarities may not prove that Chaucer knew the Decameron, they do suggest ... some variety of influence' (p. 104). The other editor even says that 'the full case is still out' (p. 281). Why, then, privilege the question in thefirstplace? Most of these essays make tried-and-true claims about the comfortable topic of the teller/tale relationship. John M . Ganim claims, predictably, that the tales and prologues ofthe Wife ofBath, Merchant, Franklin, Pardoner, and Canon's Reviews 251 Yeoman 'reveal much more about their speakers than one would expect' (p. 139). Robert W. Hanning concludes his otherwise provocative and fascinating study of the problem of 'mediation' in medieval society with the banal remark that 'the Man ofLaw's performance ofthe tale ofCustance becomes, in effect, a counterfeit letter,' a 'gravely compromised' conduit oftruth (p. 200). W e have always known, after all, that Chaucer couldn't really have believed what he wrote in the religious tales. The flip side to this procedure appears in Neuse's essay, mentioned above: in order to argue that the M o n k is a stand-in for Boccaccio, the author feels compelled to rescue the teller from those w h o judge him ill (p. 254). The upshot is that these essays in large part retreat to the critical worldview of Lumiansky's Of Sundry Folk - or, to be a bit more charitable, to a depoliticised version of that world of 1980s and '90s debates in Renaissance N e w Historicism, which went round and round on the 'subversion/containment' debate. Indeed, this is the explicit model for the essays by Linda Georgianna (Boccaccio's tales and frames contain the collection's anticlericalism; Chaucer's don't, so that his anticlericalism has 'bite': see esp. p. 150) and Ganim, w h o clunkily claims that 'the new languages of commerce, travel, science, social dislocation, and protest . . . are contained within a syntax still structured on the model of a discourse designed at least partly to contain these new forces' (p. 142). There are some fine essays in this collection. Karla Taylor's 'Chaucer's Uncommon Voice: Some Contexts for Influence' argues that in trecento Italian literature Chaucer 'found provocation to imagine from this position [on the margins of the court] a vernacular poetry independent...