Fallible Authors: Chaucer’s Pardoner and Wife of Bath by Alastair Minnis (review)

REVIEWS 317 Alastair Minnis, Fallible Authors: Chaucer’s Pardoner and Wife of Bath (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press 2008) xvi + 510 pp. Fallible Authors is Alastair Minnis’s third book (of four) concerning medieval authorship and authority. All of them are notable for their erudition and mastery , Fallible Authors being no exception. Indeed, the first, Medieval Theory of Authorship: Scholastic Literary Attitudes in the Later Middle Ages, is in the process of being reissued in its second edition by the University of Pennsylvania Press. The second, Magister Amoris: The ‘Roman de la Rose’ and Vernacular Hermeneutics, has become a critical mainstay. I suspect Fallible Authors and Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature: Valuing the Vernacular, Minnis’s most recent publication (University of Cambridge Press 2009), will follow suit. Fallible Authors is much broader in scope than its subtitle may imply. While it deals at length in Chapters 2 and 4 respectively on the Chaucerian characters of the Pardoner and the Wife of Bath, the book as a whole has a much larger concern, and at every moment, Minnis draws from a vast pool of Latin and vernacular sources, both published and unpublished, to augment his analysis. The Pardoner and the Wife of Bath act as the loci of that critical examination, exemplifying the two main issues of concern: the tension that arises when fallible individuals are invested in offices of moral authority (Chapters 1 and 2) and the female herself as a fallible author (Chapters 3 and 4). Minnis describes his critical goals in the following way: “My ambition is to place Chaucer, as a maker of texts, alongside his contemporary workers in the medium of power, thereby relating his discourses of authority and fallibility to the larger ideological sources that gave them meaning” (4). Chapter 1, “De officio praedicatoris: Of Preaching, Pardons, and Power,” introduces three major aspects of authority as it relates to the figure of the pardoner : the public/private state of the preacher’s sins, the ability to dispense sacraments either in baptism or in the Eucharist, and how those issues relate to the spiritual economy of salvation as manifested particularly in the making of indulgences. The final section on the spiritual treasury is especially well done in its explication of a rational, yet often non-intuitive form of calculation. In Chapter 2, “Moral Fallibility: Chaucer’s Pardoner and the Office of Preacher,” Minnis turns to the figure of the Pardoner himself. Each of the four parts of this chapter addresses the Pardoner’s deviancy from moral, legal, or social norms. The final section on the questionable sexuality (interpreted in many ways) of the Pardoner serves as the transition to the second half of the book, which deals primarily with the fallibility inherent in women’s bodies. Fallibility here is either manifested by or rooted in the body. Chapter 3, “De impedimento sexus: Women’s Bodies and the Prohibition of Priestly Power,” focuses primarily on a historical discussion of the authority (or rather lack thereof) of women. Minnis moves from orthodox discussions of women’s authority and finishes with a survey of sorts of various heterodox approaches to women as preachers. In his analysis of Lollard approaches to the authority of women, he asserts that Lollard practice was actually much closer to orthodox practice than previous scholarship may imply. In Chapter 4, “Gender as Fallibility: Chaucer’s Wife of Bath and the Impediment of Sex,” Minnis turns to the Wife of Bath as a foil to the Pardoner. REVIEWS 318 While they are both “usurpers of the office of preacher,” their status as fallible authors is actually quite different because the fallibility of the Pardoner is remediable , and hence temporary, whereas the fallibility of the Wife of Bath was permanent—an effect of her gender (246). After a brief discussion situating the Wife of Bath among various types of medieval authorities, Minnis overturns the interpretation of the Wife as a model of Lollard beliefs and then explains how Chaucer challenges two stereotypes of the old woman (in the tale) and the widow. If there is anything to criticize in this masterful work, it is that Minnis seems overly restrained in expressing his opinions in Chapter...