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Essays in Medieval Studies 20 (2003) 125-133



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"The Doctrine of These Olde Wyse":
Commentary on the Commentary Tradition in Chaucer's Dream Visions

Josephine Bloomfield
Ohio University


Peter Abelard, who in his Sic et non comments on both scriptural and patristic writings, begins this work by noting that there are writings of authorities—such as the Holy Fathers—that not only differ from each other but even contradict each other. Interestingly, he calls on one of those authorities, St. Augustine, to give authority for his argument that authorities are not always consistent or correct. 1

While one would hesitate to cite this quite serious commentary on commentary as a source for Chaucer's not-so-serious disquisition on authority at the beginning of the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, their placement is, notably, exactly the same—the first lines of the prologue to the work—and in each case the author rapidly follows reasons to question authority with arguments for following authority nevertheless. The effects of the two prologues are not so different either: though Abelard goes on to strongly defend the inalterable rightness of Scripture, no matter how apparently contradictory it may seem, 2 his having introduced the notion of scriptural fallibility changed much subsequent commentary. As A. J. Minnis notes in his 1988 Medieval Literary Theory and Criticism, "Abelard's successors . . . return[ed] again and again to consider the awful possibility that Holy Scripture might contain error or even downright falsehood" (68). Likewise, readers and commentators on Chaucer's Legend of Good Women struggle with the ways that Chaucer's commentary on the problems of authority (ll. F 1-34; G 1-34) 3 undercuts, subverts, or deconstructs the text that follows. Chaucer offers an equally subversive proem to his dream vision The House of Fame in which the narrator presents a skeptical commentary on all of the major commentaries on the meaning and causes of dreams immediately before presenting his dream (ll. 1-58). At the beginning of the Parliament of Fowls the dreamer is also engaged with authoritative commentaries—in this case on both love and dreams—and manages [End Page 125] before telling his dream to prove by the authorities both that his dream was significant and that it was insignificant (ll. 95-108). Even in the preface to his earliest dream vision, The Book of the Duchess, Chaucer's narrator engages with authoritative dream commentary by saying that none of the authorities, not even Joseph or Macrobius, would be able to make sense of his dream (ll. 279-289). In his dream visions, then, Chaucer seems to be exploiting and playing with the authority constructed by the high medieval practice of systematic textual commentary—a practice of commenting on authoritative texts that in itself, of course, produces authoritative texts that sometimes supersede the originals in importance. More interestingly, perhaps, this particular play of Chaucer's in his dream visions assumes the audience's deep familiarity not just with the commentary tradition but, I would argue, with the very specific practices and modes of that tradition.

As Rita Copeland, Alastair Minnis, and others have noted, if we have consulted the collections of medieval accessus ad auctores, we will have observed the close similarities between a preface to Ovid's Heroides that occurs in the collections of accessus and the Prologue to Chaucer's Legend of Good Women. 4 In the preface to Ovid's work, the now unknown commentator, explaining how Ovid came to write the Heroides, suggests that

He was brought up on charges before Caesar, because in his writings he had taught Roman matrons about illicit love affairs: whence he composed his book for them, offering it as an exemplum, so that they should know which women they should imitate in the matter of love and which women they should not imitate. 5

Though in the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women Chaucer substitutes the God of Love for Caesar and himself for Ovid, it seems almost certain from the exactness of...

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