In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER this reader at least, the real achievement of The Hengwrt Chaucer Digital Facsimile is the extent to which it provides us with what Stubbs calls the ‘‘holistic view of the manuscript as artefact’’ (Editor’s Introduction). This is facilitated by the inclusion of images of the so-called the Merthyr Fragment (three folios surviving from a very early manuscript, comprising part of the Nun’s Priest’s Prologue and Tale). The fragment is described by Mosser, and contextualized by Ceridwen Lloyd Morgan. It is Lloyd Morgan’s historical introduction, combined with her edition and translation of the Welsh marginalia, which reinforces our awareness of the fragment’s current geographical location, and by extension that of the Hengwrt Chaucer, in the heartland of Welsh-speaking Wales. Any text—whether it is a manuscript, an early printed text, a scholarly edition , a hypertext, or a facsimile—is always also a product of the cultures that produced and preserved it. The Hengwrt Chaucer is no exception. The full circumstances of its composition will never be fully known, and although we can ascertain that it arrived in Cheshire and then Wales at a fairly early date, those that account for its survival have only partially been explained. Yet it is, perhaps, a fitting irony that a poem written in English at a time when the English vernacular was challenging the dominance of Latin should find itself in a place where Welsh continues its struggle for survival against what is now often thought of as a colonialist tongue. The Hengwrt Chaucer Digital Facsimile returns the Hengwrt Chaucer to the center of the English-speaking virtual world, while, thankfully, the manuscript remains at the contested margin of its real equivalent. Diane Watt University of Wales, Aberystwyth Stephanie Trigg. Congenial Souls: Reading Chaucer from Medieval to Postmodern . Medieval Cultures 30. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002. Pp. xxiv, 280. $57.95 cloth, $22.95 paper. Stephanie Trigg’s title comes from Dryden’s account of reading Chaucer in his Fables Ancient and Modern, published in 1700: ‘‘(If I may be permitted to say it of myself) I found I had a Soul congenial to his.’’ Her book is a study of the various forms of commentary on Chaucer over the 438 ................. 10286$ CH15 11-01-10 13:55:30 PS REVIEWS centuries, from Lydgate to herself, and in particular of the progression from the reading of his works to criticism on them. Analogous studies could be written about any canonical author, but there is one respect in which Chaucer is unique, and that is the degree to which readers of all centuries cast him as a personal friend. No one to my knowledge has claimed such kinship with (for instance) Milton, and identification with Shakespeare is typically extended to his characters rather than himself —as in Coleridge’s notorious ‘‘I have a smack of Hamlet about me, if I may say so.’’ That same air of apology hangs around the many remarks about personal acquaintance with Chaucer too, as if everyone who claims it recognizes its impossibility, its arrogance, and, in the present state of criticism, its theoretical incorrectness; but even that last handicap has tended to result not in the motif’s deletion but in its application to other people—the great and good retiring Chaucerians who are acclaimed for such affinity with the Master. The recurrence of that sense of personal intimacy forms a continuing theme throughout Stephanie Trigg’s book, across all the different categories of reception she charts—Lydgate and the fifteenth century; the early printed editions; Dryden and the Enlightenment efforts to keep Chaucer in the forefront of public consciousness; the promotion of popular appeal in the work of Furnivall, Chesterton, and Woolf; and the latest developments in Chaucerian criticism for both student and professional readerships. Her starting point is the cover of the paperback edition of The Riverside Chaucer: a detail of the famous illustration to Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes, which shows Lydgate himself and some of the other pilgrims setting out from Canterbury (the city is visible in the background) on their return journey. She stresses the supplementary quality of both the picture...

pdf

Share