The New Medievalization of Chaucer

The New Medievalization of Chaucer Stephanie Trigg The University of Melbourne Introducing his study of Chaucer’s words in The Making of Chaucer’s English, Christopher Cannon argues that the linguistic study of Chaucer comes ‘‘tarred with the brush of philology’s past and its nowdisreputable positivism.’’1 It’s true that after its heyday in the nineteenth century, philology, like positivism, attracted some very negative press in the twentieth, especially under those paradigms of literary criticism which prized ambiguity, complexity, or undecidability. Destabilizing the customary opposition between philology and criticism, between the restrictive certainties of positivism and the beautiful uncertainties of interpretation, Cannon argues that even philology can be ‘‘rooted in crushing doubt.’’2 Central to his claims for the subtle attractions of philology is his lengthy quotation from the introduction to the Oxford English Dictionary and its editors’ understanding that ‘‘fixing quantities and circumscribing limits can only be a point of departure for the mind that endeavours to grasp ambiguity and uncertainty.’’3 In the field of literary studies, it’s almost a point of honor to embrace ambiguity and uncertainty. It’s also true that if we learned anything from the heady days of deconstruction, we learned that any text, of any kind, can be reduced to doubt, to undecidability, even to meaninglessness . So it should be easy for us to accept, theoretically, that the materials and data of linguistic analysis, for example, might not all sustain the epistemological priority they are traditionally accorded over criticism. Similarly, we are increasingly ready to accept that the decisions of textual critics aren’t made independently of, or meaningfully prior to, the work of literary critics. We have also learned to pay due attention to the 1 Christopher Cannon, The Making of Chaucer’s English: A Study of Words (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 2. 2 Cannon, The Making of Chaucer’s English, p. 3. 3 Cannon, The Making of Chaucer’s English, p. 4 347 ................. 9680$$ CH15 11-01-10 12:36:36 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ways in which we produce and maintain the boundaries between different ‘‘kinds’’ of text—literary, linguistic, historical, and so forth—and the different kinds of approaches each text seems to invite. Further, we recognize that those boundaries are rarely innocent of their own ideological underpinnings: or at least, that we cannot ignore their ideological effects. This is one of the persistent themes of the ‘‘new philology,’’ or the ‘‘new medievalism,’’ after all. Moving from the level of theory to practice, however, is more difficult . The various intellectual traditions that compete for our allegiance as medievalists are extremely powerful, especially in their formation of us as individual disciplinary subjects. Old habits, that is, die hard, and it is probably still true to say that for many Chaucerians, the work of editors, prosodists, etymologists, and semanticists remains firmly in the background, highlighted only when we wish to dispute a point, or to use this work as a point of departure for our own critical insights. One such powerful tradition is the reception of Chaucer that sets him somewhat apart from ‘‘Middle English.’’ This opposition is played out with particular force when we consider the relations between philology and criticism. In the second half of the nineteenth century, when ‘‘English’’ was struggling for acceptance as an examinable academic discipline in the university sector, medieval literature gained earlier and easier admission to the syllabus. ‘‘Middle English’’ both named a language, and implied a pedagogic practice that was subject to the rigors of philology, dialectology , palaeography, codicology, and history, disciplines familiar from classical studies. Chaucer’s texts were included under this rubric, but ‘‘Chaucer,’’ on the other hand, also enjoyed membership in a longer literary tradition, and a differently ordered syllabus. The pedagogy associated with this tradition seemed much less secure, in those early days, governed as it was by the disciplines of authorial biography, aesthetic evaluation, and personal response. After a shaky beginning, however, this set of practices went on, much modified, to become the mainstream of ‘‘English’’ studies today, in which Chaucer still enjoys a special place. But even before the academic and professional study of English literature was founded at...