Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Post-modern (review)

Reviews 239 that presumably to heighten its appeal the book is misrepresented. The back cover blurb claims that Sullivan 'challenges the accuracy of the transcript', but if this were so much of her analysis would evaporate. The book's lack of an overall conclusion perhaps results from the author's own sense of confusion about its aims and findings. Kim M. Phillips Department of History University of Auckland Tttgg, Stephanie, Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern (Medieval Cultures, vol. 30), Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 2001; paper; pp. xxiv, 280; R R P US$22.95; ISBN 0816638233. Stephanie Trigg takes Chaucer studies since the fifteenth century as a problem in literary history, analysing the tendency of critics to identify with Chaucer on an almost personal basis and thereby constructing an imaginary fraternity of Chaucer's readers across time. As an exercise in what French sociologists call the history of taste, Trigg's erudite and often brilliant study uncovers h o w seemingly popular literature can be appropriated to processes of cultural exclusion. When Chaucer scholarship thinks it is broadening readerships and making culture available, it is sometimes restricting access to that very culture by defining that access in very special ways. The most apparently appealing and natural illusion of Chaucer's poetry, that he speaks to us as one of us, turns out to be problematic and even sinister when elevated into critical discourse, mapping Chaucer by lines of gender, class and nation. The book progresses by means of chapters that are simultaneously thematic and historical in development. In Chapter One, Trigg critiques the surprisingly substantial critical commentary surrounding Chaucer's short poems, addressed to his friends Scogan and Bukton, noting the tendency of critics to become part of the 'bachelor party' audience suggested by Chaucer's poems. In Chapter Two, she describes the practice of scholars 'signing' Chaucer, completing his texts through editorial emendations and reconstructions, as well as engaging in jocular, informal imitations of his language, which nevertheless reveal a desire to be part of the club. In Chapter Three, she treats medieval and early modem attempts to 'complete' the incomplete Canterbury Tales by adding tales or even inserting oneself into the company of pilgrims. Chapters Four, Five 240 Reviews and Six trace the history of Chaucer reception, emphasizing the development of a certain notion of Englishness intimately tied to the idea of a personal Chaucer, fully articulated in Dryden, but repeated by many readers. Even given the amount of scholarship on nineteenth century medieval studies, Trigg is able to make an original contribution, explaining, for instance, the compromises of FurnivaU's publication agendas by a conflict between his broad social mission and the rules of the Chaucer club as they are written in the history she has traced. Chapter Seven, on late twentieth century criticism, demonstrates how profoundly these earlier older traditions still limit Chaucer studies. Teaching Chaucer, and presumably teaching other authors as well, it would seem, remains as much a process of initiation as of education, a situation that threatens the very existence of literary study. Trigg's purposeful readings of offhand comments by the critics themselves are uncannily perceptive. I a m cited, for instance, to illustrate a certain attitude towards Chaucer's audience that developed in the 1980s, to the effect that Chaucer's circle consisted of a small core of readers attuned to avantgarde experimentation. True enough, I was an art snob in the 1980s. And she performs similar readings of many other critics, turning the tables against priestly positions. Trigg identifies Charles Muscatine's presidential address to the Chaucer Society as typical of a certain sense of genial irony typical of Chaucer's intimate readers, poking fun at the seriousness of our o w n scholarship. Yet one would never know from such an account that Muscatine was also author of the widely read 'Muscatine Report' on American university education in the wake of 1968 and the Free Speech movement at Berkeley, nor that he risked his own career in the earlier loyalty oath controversy at the University of California. But her method works more often than not, and reveals more subjective motivations than an intentionalist analysis might...