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STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER bounds of the familiar fragments. Given the variety of links available to early producers, along with other evidence of tale-switching among pilgrims, there can be little doubt that Chaucer experimented with different tale orders within certain groupings. Blake, however, is aiming at a recent orthodoxy that assumes Chaucer never put together a ‘‘complete ’’ manuscript of The Canterbury Tales before his death, and thus never settled on a final tale order or set of links for all twenty-four tales and tale fragments. The second point is thus the leap of faith that betrays Blake’s underlying desire: to date some surviving manuscript(s) of The Canterbury Tales before Chaucer’s death. Blake relies on recent arguments by art historian Kathleen Scott that push Ellesmere’s speculative date of production (specifically, the date of its decoration) closer to 1400, the year of Chaucer’s death. However, Scott’s arguments do not serve as an adequate safety net for Blake’s syllogistic hope that other early manuscripts may therefore date from before 1400. Blake’s extensive and distinguished work on the textual tradition of the Canterbury Tales has always been helpfully contentious. His argument here, however , needs more than the evidence of the links to argue for a ‘‘complete ’’ Canterbury Tales—whether in the form of lost authorial holographs or surviving manuscripts—from Chaucer’s lifetime. No festschrift offers a buffet for every taste, nor can one community of scholars fulfill every hope raised by the title’s promise of New Perspectives on Middle English Texts. The editors have been kind enough to provide a decent index, so navigation through the disparate choices is reasonably efficient. Sometimes in these pages, it must be said, research informed by current literary theory seems more willfully ignored than thoughtfully put aside or selectively deployed. Yet this volume argues eloquently that close attention to texts and manuscripts can yield remarkable new finds and new directions for medievalists of all kinds. Joel Fredell Southeastern Lousiana University David Raybin & Linda Tarte Holley eds., Closure in the Canterbury Tales: the Role of The Parson’s Tale, vol. 41 in Studies in Medieval Culture. Kalamazoo, Mich.: Medieval Institute Publications, 2000. Pp. xxi, 268. $40.00 cloth, 20.00 paper The essays collected in this volume offer a variety of approaches to The Parson’s Tale, although all agree on the necessity of asserting its worthi426 ................. 9680$$ CH16 11-01-10 12:37:26 PS REVIEWS ness for study in the wake of those eminent Chaucerians who once dismissed it, namely, Donaldson and Muscatine. The collection begins with an overview of scholarship by Siegfried Wenzel, ‘‘The Parson’s Tale in Current Literary Studies,’’ which provides a clear and concise analysis of the trends in criticism. Wenzel divides the critical tradition into two approaches: perspectivist and teleological (pp. 5–6), or those who view the tale as ironic and those who do not. This attention to criticism is also at hand in the annotated bibliography included at the end of the volume. Wenzel’s synthesizing approach is particularly useful in a volume in which the majority of essays take up very specific and quite disparate questions. Although the title of the volume refers to the position of The Parson’s Tale in The Canterbury Tales, the majority of the essays offer interpretations without reference to the rest of the Canterbury Tales, with two exceptions , which I shall discuss here. The first is David Raybin’s essay, ‘‘‘Manye been the weyes’: The Flower, Its Roots, and the Ending of The Canterbury Tales,’’ in which Raybin argues for a shared ‘‘inclusive spiritual model’’ in The Parson’s Tale and the rest of The Canterbury Tales (13). Raybin sees the emphasis on sin and contrition as evidence for Chaucer’s interest in (and acceptance of) variety, and the journey itself (rather than the end goal of satisfaction). He then closes by connecting the tolerance of The Parson’s Tale with that of a number of other tales (those of the Friar, Pardoner, Clerk, and Melibee): ‘‘God uses devils, and unpleasant pardoners, to offer diverse solutions to overcome the equally diverse varieties of sin’’ (38). Despite his focus on Chaucer...

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