Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance ed. by Theresa M. Krier (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER is quite aware, to his credit, of that side of Petrarch’s construction of the self that is historically engaged. His interpretation of Griselda and Walter as a new Mary and Joseph who act out the productive dysfunctionalism of the Holy Family at once estranges Chaucer’s tale from Boccaccio’s and Petrarch’s and connects it to theirs. By distinguishing between connection and influence, Koff contributes inventively to what I have found most valuable about this timely book and what makes it essential reading for all Chaucerians; the reconfiguration of the modes by which we can read Chaucer and Italy. Warren Ginsberg University of Oregon Theresa M. Krier, ed. Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance. Gainesville : University Press of Florida, 1998. Pp. viii, 240. $49.95 This edited collection furthers a concern with the Chaucerian afterlife in the sixteenth century, building on Seth Lerer’s work on the fifteenth century and books by Alice Miskimin and Ann Thompson on Chaucer in the Renaissance. It is a carefully organized book, in which everything has been done to harmonize the contents as far as possible and to make it a valuable reference. The notes appear at the end of every contribution and are keyed to a full bibliography; there is some cross-referencing between essays, confirming (in a scholarly world in which collections of loosely linked essays proliferate unstoppably) that this really is an edited collection on a viable theme that does what its title says it will do. The book opens with Theresa Krier’s surveying introduction, in which she introduces the psychoanalytic theory of Melanie Klein in order to think about the way in which Chaucer was received in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a gift. Part 1 of the collection, ‘‘Forming Canons,’’ then features three essays; John Watkins on Wyatt and the Tudor canonization of Chaucer, Carol A. N. Martin on Renaissance poetics and Chaucer’s House of Fame, and Clare R. Kinney on Speght’s 1602 edition of Chaucer and its highlighting of ‘‘Sentence and Prouerbe’’ in Troilus and Criseyde. The three essays in part 2 (‘‘Claims for Narrative Poetry: Chaucer and Spenser’’) tackle Spenser, with Judith H. Anderson’s consideration 576 ................. 8972$$ CH21 11-01-10 12:23:27 PS REVIEWS of the poet in The Canterbury Tales and The Faerie Queene, Craig A. Berry on Spenser’s continuation of The Squire’s Tale, and Glenn Steinberg’s comparison of Daphnaı̈da and The Book of the Duchess. Spenser is also the focus of the first essay in part 3 (‘‘Gender and the Translation of Genre’’) in A. Kent Hieatt’s essay on books 3–4 of The Faerie Queene and the way in which some sense can be made of their narrative by reference to the Franklin’s Prologue as it appeared in the Thynne group of Chaucer editions, one of which Spenser used. The collection then closes with Theresa Krier’s argument for the influence of The Parlement of Foules on Love’s Labour’s Lost and Helen Cooper on Jacobean rethinkings of Chaucerian narrative, particularly The Two Noble Kinsmen. When Refiguring Chaucer, in a decision defended in Krier’s introduction , preserves the traditional term ‘‘Renaissance,’’ all of the essays question the account the Renaissance has given of itself. Their emphasis is on the continuities between Chaucer and his early modern successors rather than the traditional notion of an absolute divide between medieval and early modern. The book opens strongly with an exemplary new historicist essay on Wyatt that builds on existing work questioning Wyatt’s supposed turn against the medieval past. Seeing William Thynne ’s 1532 edition of Chaucer as aligned with the Tudor program of centralizing power, Watkins shows how Wyatt, who might be thought to have an affinity for Thynne’s proto-Protestant, pro-Royal Chaucer, instead appropriates Chaucer as an oppositional voice. As his own position at court becomes more marginal, Wyatt turns to Troilus, The Knight’s Tale, and Boethian lyrics, working into his verse Boethian counsels he can never quite heed. Watkins obviously draws here on Greenblatt and is also indebted to the medievalist historicism of Paul Strohm. So much seems expected...