Sacred and Profane in Chaucer and Late Medieval Literature: Essays in Honour of John V. Fleming (review)

The distinguished Chaucerian, Princetonian, and blogger John V. Fleming retired in 2006. He continues to add to a learned and wide-ranging oeuvre (his most recent book is a study of the literary representation of the USSR in the Cold War West) that includes the editing (with Thomas J. Heffernan) of the second Studies in the Age of Chaucer (1986). This is the second of two festschrifts to have appeared. A collection of essays, edited by Michael F. Cusato and Guy Geltner, honoring his work on Franciscan texts and history, came out in 2009 as Defenders and Critics of Franciscan Life. The present volume grew out of a symposium arranged in Fleming’s honor at Princeton in 2006. The ten essays, all by Fleming’s former students, make a lively collection.

In their substantial and thought-provoking introduction, William Robins and Robert Epstein have more to say about the profane than the sacred, seeking to disturb the straightforward binary of sacred and profane by complicating the latter term, which can include senses both of transgressive irreligiosity and of the simply secular. For them, and for contributors to this volume, the profane is “the point at which the sacred and the secular converge” (23).

The first two essays make a nicely complementary pair: both are concerned with biblical women who are the victims of a lustful male gaze, and both extend their inquiry beyond the Middle Ages into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. David Lyle Jeffrey writes on Bathsheba, especially in the postmedieval period (culminating with Rembrandt), while Lynn Staley (more substantially) examines Susanna, with particular reference to the self-understandings of victims of religious persecution and legal process, from the Lollards Walter Brut and William Thorpe onward.

The core of the book is provided by five essays on Chaucer’s poetry, several of them in close dialogue with John Fleming’s own work. Jamie C. Fumo situates Troilus and Criseyde’s attitudes to, and belief in, love in relation to fourteenth-century discourses about love for and belief in God, associating Criseyde with what Fleming had identified as “philosophical atheism.” William Robins delves rewardingly into Trojan sanitation to find, in Troilus’s supposed route to Pandarus’s house on the night when he will consummate his love for Criseyde (“thorough a goter, by a pryve wente”), a “strangely fraught nexus of sewage, idolatry, and love” (104). Julia Marvin offers a close reading of the F Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, and of the tale of Dido, with the question of old books to the fore. Robert Epstein shows how the generally accepted reading of The Summoner’s Tale as turning on the opposition of the material and the spiritual is complicated by the fact (increasingly recognized in the late Middle Ages) that money is not material, but “a sophisticated philosophical abstraction” (134) susceptible of learned academic analysis—which Epstein provides by way of Bourdieu and fourteenth-century Oxford. And Martin Camargo finds some telling parallels between the list of don’ts given in his advice on preaching style by the fourteenth-century Dominican Thomas Waleys and the performance of the Pardoner. It seems that, in his cocksure estimation of his rhetorical prowess (which we have tended to accept at face value), the Pardoner may have been deluding himself after all. Camargo usefully provides a translation of the relevant chapter of Waleys as an appendix.

Fiona Tolhurst’s essay on Margery Kempe is somewhat out on a limb. Her argument, that “Kempe might have had a more basic and more orthodox purpose for writing than critics often suggest” (197), is avow-edly a corrective to recent work (especially the books by Karma Lochrie and Lynn Staley) that would see her as radical and (in several senses) heterodox. Such readings do not perhaps have quite the hegemony that Tolhurst assumes, but nonetheless...