Philosophical Chaucer: Love, Sex, and Agency in the Canter-bury Tales by Mark Miller (review)

REVIEWS 261 accessed only by way of the sacramental Holy Grail guarded by women angels or “priestesses” (87). In closing, every entertaining exposition of this caliber brings with it the commendable realization that a passionate scholar has full command of the material under discussion. Thus, let not this medievalist’s wish list for chapter 7 on the inevitable historical and current influence of “The Once and Future King,” be construed as criticism. It is rather the resulting eagerness to follow the disclosure of more riveting topics. What can be said for the renewed interest in the mysterious twelfth century discovery and sixteenth century vanishing of Arthur’s relics? Exactly which historians or “modern archeologists” are using such ancient revelations as a relevant and dedicated “source of debate” (107)? Furthermore, how did the historically documented premature deaths of the young royals bearing the name of the legendary Arthur (the grandson of Henry II and sons of Henry VII and Henry VIII), serve to perpetuate national mythic perceptions of the one, true, and irreplaceable monarch whose “return” would ultimately redeem British heritage? IVANA MLADENOVIC, Art History, UCLA Mark Miller, Philosophical Chaucer: Love, Sex, and Agency in the Canterbury Tales (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005) x + 289 pp. Philosophical Chaucer: Love, Sex, and Agency in the Canterbury Tales gives a provocative account of the complicated relationship between the Canterbury Tales and the intellectual commitments of late medieval culture, and it suggests ways in which our current intellectual commitments might respond more sensitively to Chaucer’s own than they have in the past. In doing so, Miller offers new readings of four of the tales as well as suggest a new critical perspective on the Canterbury Tales as a whole. Miller takes as the starting point of his discussion the interest that current scholarship and Chaucer share in the question of normativity, i.e., the means by which a subject conforms to what is “normal.” Miller takes the modern term in two senses: first, the ideological normativity familiar from post-structuralist criticism that understands normativity as a kind of subjection to hegemonic standards and, second, the ethical normativity in which the authority of “rational and ethical considerations is understood not in terms of ‘subjection’ but rather as essential to the pursuit of autonomy, or a good life, or happiness” (13). Miller acknowledges that these terms and their definitions would be alien to Chaucer, but nevertheless it has been absolutely clear for some time that Chaucer was occupied by the same questions that animate their modern use: What does society expect from a “normal” woman (or knight or shield-bearer or nun’s priest)? What, on the other hand, does philosophy or religion consider a “normal” or “good” person? Crucially Chaucer asks a further question, how can a person make good the claims both of our social construction and the goals that reason constructs for us? “Chaucer,” Miller suggests, “is less interested in the abstract articulation of philosophical problems themselves than he is in the ways persons inhabit them, in what we might call the affective and political life of philosophical problems” (30–31). Since sexuality has occupied a central place in the moral imagination of Christianity since St. Paul, and since it has remained a focus for current critical debates about Chaucer, Miller chooses to REVIEWS 262 track this “affective and political life” in four of Chaucer’s tales that discuss sexual normativity in particular: the Knight’s, the Miller’s, the Wife of Bath’s, and the Clerk’s. Miller wants his book to “help us understand Chaucer’s moral seriousness as something other than the moralizing it has often been taken to be” (4), and by and large he succeeds. To his mind “moralizing” refers to the interpretation of Chaucer according to patristic standards, as though Chaucer was interested first and foremost in elaborating Christian dogma; “moral seriousness,” on the other hand, seeks to uncover what was disturbing and inassimilable within that dogma. The Canterbury Tales do not produce moral clarity from the “tangle of [our] intuitions,” according to Miller; rather they are interested in “an understanding and exploration of the tangle itself, of the necessarily opaque and incoherent situtatedness from which...