An Introduction to the Canterbury Tales: Reading, Fiction, Context by Helen Phillips (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER work provides a useful background but little specialized material on England and none on the transition to Renaissance romance. For those working on French romance, the material is more relevant—but this may not be the obvious resource for those readers. In an ideal world, the study would include further consideration of English social and intellectual contexts , a more general essay on the development of English romance, and some broader perspectives on the tangled issue of romance. Corinne Saunders University of Durham Helen Phillips. An Introduction to the Canterbury Tales: Reading, Fiction , Context. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000. Pp. vi, 254. $90.00 cloth, $19.95 paper Over the past few years, publishers have turned out guides, handbooks, companions, and casebooks, an appropriate number of them on Chaucer , at a rate not seen since the 1960s, presumably to capture a growing market of undergraduate students. In terms of background handbooks and companions, the result has been a rich and interesting crop. Peter Beidler’s edition of critical approaches to Geoffrey Chaucer: The Wife of Bath (Boston and New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 1996) is an exemplary volume to teach in courses on literary criticism. Lillian Bisson’s Chaucer and the Late Medieval World (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998) is a helpful presentation of historical and cultural contexts with suggestions as to how Chaucer’s text interacts with those contexts. Peter Brown’s edition of A Companion to Chaucer (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000) is an innovative reinvention of the genre of the companion. On the other hand, what is surprising about this upsurge in numbers of close tale-by-tale guides (as opposed to conceptual or thematic companions and handbooks ) is how well the versions of thirty years ago hold up, and how little the newer versions add to what must be a pedagogical consensus still dominated by the New Criticism and the discipline of close reading, despite the theoretical developments of the past two decades. If it weren’t for the peculiar ironies of marketing, one could imagine these older introductions reprinted with not much more than updated epilogues . (Indeed, Derek Brewer’s several perennially useful guides and 420 ................. 9680$$ CH16 11-01-10 12:37:24 PS REVIEWS introductions have remained a constant on Chaucer syllabi through their thoughtful revisions.) Yet such a strategy would have deprived us of this Introduction to the Canterbury Tales (published by Macmillan in the U.K. and St. Martins’ in the U.S.A.) marked by the intelligence and elegant insight of its author, Helen Phillips. Professor Phillips is known for her technically sophisticated edition of The Book of the Duchess (Durham, Eng.: Dept. of English Language and Medieval Literature, University of Durham; St. Andrews, Fife, Scotland: Dept. of English, The University, 1982), now more readily available in a volume of Chaucer’s Dream Poetry, eds. Helen Phillips and Nick Havely. (London: Longman, 1997) as well as a series of articles that demonstrate an ability to marry traditional philology to issues of pressing theoretical concern. Although its primary aim is to elucidate each tale, Phillips’ book does have a thesis, that ‘‘Chaucer, in particular, is adept in writing in styles which seem to inhabit several different worlds simultaneously’’ (p. vi). Such a thesis places Phillips’ readings among a constellation of Chaucer studies that include David Lawton’s Chaucer’s Narrators (Cambridge: Brewer, 1985), Peggy Knapp’s Chaucer and the Social Contest (New York: Routledge, 1990), C. David Benson’s Chaucer’s Drama of Style (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), all frequently noted throughout this study, and (forlornly uncited) John M. Ganim’s Chaucerian Theatricality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990). Indeed, the most memorable and original passages, totally unexpected in an introduction of this sort, emerge from Phillips’ consideration of the social and political resonances of style. On The Clerk’s Tale, for instance, she writes that ‘‘Chaucer underlines this triumphal element in the figure of Griselda by making her voice her own endurance. . . . The power here lies partly in her imperatives: ‘dooth’, ‘axeth,’; and the control which is created through verbal patterns . . . Tension between two kinds of power, one moral and...