Chaucer's Dream Visions and Shorter Poems (review)

Reviews 221 and developing its message of continuity and sacral kingship. The artist was able to respond to and elaborate themes found within legal, literary and historical texts, as O'Meara demonstrates in her overview ofhis career. The Master of the Coronation book illustrated the works ofAristotle and Guillaume de Machaut. O'Meara argues that the sophisticated interchange between text and illustration was informed by an intellectual as well as artistic collaboration between the artist and the compilers of the text, w h o m she suggests m a y be the theologian Jean Golein, the liturgist Guillaume de Machaut and the legist Jean de Dorman. This is an exhaustive study that draws on the historical investigations into coronation ordines, the examination of political thought in the reigns of Jean le Bon and Charles V, as well as the art historical research into fourteenthcentury French art. O'Meara's book highlights the intrinsic interconnection between picture and word and how the ignoring of one diminishes our understanding of the other, especially in a manuscript where text and image were planned as a coherent unit. This is a thorough, readable and comprehensive study ofvalue to anyone interested in French politics and art, as well as an invaluable elucidation of this important historical manuscript. Judith Collard Art History and Theory University ofOtago Quinn, William A., ed., Chaucer's Dream Visions and Shorter Poems (Basic Readings in Chaucer and His Time 2), N e w York, Garland, 1999; boards; pp. xvi, 487; R R P US$85.00; ISBN 0815331002. This volume is the second in the Garland series Basic Readings in Chaucer and His Time. In keeping with the design of that series, it provides reprints of 'significant essays in thefield'that have appeared in the last 50 years, principally in order to compile a 'firs t book' for students, in this case within the areas of Chaucer's dream visions and shorter poems. A s much as anything, as both William Quinn and the series editors suggest, the compilation of a book such as this is a response to 'changed library acquisitions policies'; whether or not i t achieves its stated aim of alleviating 'the anxiety that waiting for recalled books or for interlibrary loans can cause' is a moot point. The creation of an apparently indispensable introductory book may do as much to exacerbate the problem of waiting for recalled books as it does to alleviate it. 222 Reviews Library access is one thing; pedagogical use is another, and i t can be affirmed from the outset that the collection achieves its goal of providing a mixture of basic insights and provocative studies, and of illustrating a variety of schools of interpretation or critical methodologies. Indeed, the ways in which attention to these 'minor' poems has often anticipated changing currents in critical thinking is very neatly demonstrated in the concluding essay by John Ganim, the only new piece in the volume. Having said that the volume achieves its goal, it is necessary at the same time to record it as only a qualified success. In thefirst,and most substantial of the headnotes that preface each section, Quinn admits that the work 'lacks the inherent cohesiveness that focussing on a single text or topic provides'. It is a rather curious admission, and deserves some further consideration. Elsewhere, Quinn describes the book's subject matter as a 'rather protean subset of Chaucer's works' and canvasses several other labels, betraying some anxiety about the relative status of these works, and the propriety of treating them together. Regrettably, that is all dismissed at the end of the headnote as a 'largely unresolved issue' - so 'unresolved', in fact, that w e are told on the one hand that 'the rubric "dream visions and short poems" designates no simply defined category' and that the 'dream visions have almost nothing in common', and on the other hand that treating the 'dream visions and short poems as a unified field of inquiry has produced some of the most insightful and provocative reassessments of the poet's entire corpus'. Underlying the comment about cohesiveness is equally some uncertainty about the generic status of dream poetry, although it is...