Pagans, Tartars, Moslems, and Jews in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales by Brenda Deen Schildgen (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER original contribution to East Anglian studies and to the history of early English drama. Theresa Coletti University of Maryland Brenda Deen Schildgen. Pagans, Tartars, Moslems, and Jews in Chaucer ’s Canterbury Tales. Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 2001. Pp. 183. $59.95. Brenda Deen Schildgen begins her most recent book with a striking observation on Chaucer’s worldview from Jorge Luis Borges: that the western passage from realism to nominalism took place one day in 1382 when Chaucer translated Boccaccio’s allegorical phrase ‘‘E con gli occulti ferri i Tradimenti’’ (‘‘And Treachery, with hidden weapons’’) as the surprisingly particularized ‘‘The smyler with the knyf under the cloke’’ (4). In her Introduction, Schildgen establishes as a working premise that Chaucer, who may not indeed have regarded himself as a nominalist, nevertheless lived and wrote in ‘‘an Ockhamist atmosphere’’ (6) and that the Canterbury Tales reflects the collapse of the ‘‘implacable singular view of reality’’ expressed, for example, in Dante’s Commedia (7). The tales of the Knight, Squire, Franklin, and Wife of Bath she finds to be ‘‘infused with pagan philosophy,’’ to introduce ‘‘heterodox concerns,’’ and to ‘‘resist closure,’’ in contrast to those of the Man of Law, Second Nun, and Prioress, which, in a Dante-like manner already old-fashioned by Chaucer ’s day, ‘‘divide the world between redeemed and unredeemed’’ (11). From this good start, some readers will and some will not follow Schildgen’s leap to her thesis: ‘‘Taken together, the tales probe various ethical systems and raise doubts about the ideology of a monolithic Christian West’’ (12, reviewer’s emphasis). This is no doubt the way The Canterbury Tales has usually been taught in American classrooms over the past fifty years, but whether raising doubts about Christianity was Chaucer’s intention is quite another question. Readers who balk at seeing Chaucer as an avuncular proponent of religious and ethnic diversity, poking gentle fun at those of his Pilgrims who evince more conservative (for instance, anti-Semitic) views, would be advised to ignore Schildgen’s ‘‘intentional 426 ................. 10286$ CH15 11-01-10 13:55:26 PS REVIEWS fallacy’’ passages and focus on what she has to say about these tales, their sources, and contemporary comparata. One of the virtues of Pagans, Tartars, Moslems, and Jews is its surprising and suggestive pairings of tales. The Knight’s Tale is discussed over two chapters with the Squire’s Tale, while the Wife of Bath’s Tale shares a chapter with that of the Franklin, and the Prioress’s with the Monk’s. What commonalities are highlighted by this arrangement? In the case of the Knight’s and Squire’s tales Schildgen shows that both adopt pagan philosophical perspectives, the Knight’s the Stoic and the Squire’s the Epicurean, neither of which, according to Schildgen, can ‘‘be assumed into a Christian worldview’’ (14). Yet, as she herself shows, these philosophies were widespread throughout Christian medieval Europe, not least in the romance, which would appear to undercut her main point on these two tales, that they ‘‘embrace a ‘posttraditional morality’ that refuses to impose Christian norms’’ (47). Much of her discussion of these two tales is given over to astrological matters, but there is also an interesting section on reflections in the Squire’s Tale of both Mandeville’s and Marco Polo’s stories of the Tartars. With the Man of Law’s Tale, Schildgen focuses on ‘‘binary spatial oppositions ’’ (49)—actually, more of a triptych, with Rome flanked by Islam and English heathenism. She shows how a thoroughgoing medieval distinction between ‘‘intellectual and political Islam’’ (53) could have allowed Chaucer both to cite Moslem scientists as authorities and to echo vicious Crusader propaganda, but ultimately, I believe, she overreads the (fairy)Tale with Edward-Said-supported talk of ‘‘an unregenerate history of interconnected sexual-political conspiracy and betrayal’’ (62) and so on. We learn little about medieval views of Moslems in this discussion that is not already clear in the Tale. The chapter on the Wife of Bath’s Tale and the Franklin’s Tale presents some interesting analogues for what Schildgen calls ‘‘the green world’’ of the Wife’s Tale and the garden...