The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question ed. by Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen (review)

REVIEWS to reflect a trend counter to the social economies of the period. The catch is that both readings could also find meaning after the fact in semantic shifts of the more common, untargeted variety, in which belletristic use is not necessarily representative or influential. For the Great Vowel Shift, we can consult rhymes and the direct testimony of early modern orthoepists to get a reasonable sense of what happened. But although early modern language planners concerned themselves with the overall content of the English lexicon, they did not characteristically focus on the meaning of individual words. Early grammatical discussion, further, is largely a self-contained discourse intentionally excluding what we would today call politics and philosophy. Hence, for nice and uncouth as for all of Knapp’s eleven words, we do not have significant metalinguistic commentary, and the contextual evidence is additionally limited by its written channel, leaving out the many spoken examples that typically drive untargeted change. Issues of linguistic change as such lie outside the scope of Time-Bound Words, whose strength lies in Knapp’s treatment of individual usages. The treatment of all eleven words is thorough and provocative, with that of providence being the strongest. Here, the word is nearly indistinguishable from the concept, so that writers’ transforming uses of it do indeed reflect general reorientations in cultural meaning. If other cases lack the contextual evidence that might firmly identify a shift as a targeted reflection of social reorganization, the provocative interplay that Knapp sees between language and society makes this book well worth reading. Tim William Machan Marquette University Leonard Michael Koff and Brenda Deen Schildgen, eds. The Decameron and the Canterbury Tales: New Essays on an Old Question. Madison and Teaneck, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2000. Pp. 352. $52.50. Over the last three decades, Chaucerians have increasingly challenged the ruling assumption that The Canterbury Tales owes nothing to the Decameron. The eleven contributors to this important volume want to 571 ................. 8972$$ CH21 11-01-10 12:23:25 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER settle the issue once and for all: as Peter Beidler entitles his lead essay, ‘‘Just Say Yes, Chaucer Knew the Decameron.’’ Those who said no, of course, said so because Chaucer, who rendered lengthy passages from the Filostrato and Teseida, never put into verse a single sentence that unquestionably came from one of Boccaccio’s stories. This textual absence provided gainsayers the evidence they wanted to quarantine the Decameron, often for tendentious purposes of preserving Chaucer’s morality or enhancing his genius; from advocates it has provoked a variety of explanations, the most prominent of which is Chaucer’s ‘‘memorial’’ reconstruction of the ‘‘novelle.’’ To my mind, however, precisely because it discomfits efforts to hardwire the connection between the Decameron and the Tales, the absence is crucial for reclaiming the impress of Boccaccio ’s work. Rather than reason it away, Chaucer’s failure to echo the Decameron’s prose suggests a need to rethink the dynamics of crosscultural translation; instead of asking what Chaucer did to Boccaccio or Boccaccio to Chaucer, we might more profitably examine how distinct aesthetic and social traditions shaped the qualities of fiction one way in Florence and another in London. By assessing the extent to which modes of making meaning differed in Italy and England, and why, we can analyze the preoccupations both authors shared without running into the cul-de-sac of intentionality or erasing obliquities of history in the name of influence. Although all the essayists believe the Decameron affected the Tales, their arguments divide by adhering to one or the other of these approaches . Peter Beidler investigates Boccaccio’s reception in terms of Chaucer’s knowledge; his goal, however, is to consider not how but whether Chaucer knew the Decameron. Beidler reviews and critiques opinion on both sides; after revivifying the case for memorial borrowing, he discusses which stories Chaucer most likely knew and what comparing the writers tells us about each. He then formalizes his conclusions by offering new definitions of source, hard, and soft analogues. Beidler’s refutation of naysayers’ claims is excellent; his own brief I find less convincing. Beidler’s own exposition shows...