Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings ed. by Sheila Delany (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER wedding banquet at which Charles VI and other courtiers disguised themselves as wild men and the ‘‘interlude’’ of the Green Knight in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Crane argues that unlike the popular variety , courtly charivari does not seek to assert order but rather to find an excuse for riotous behavior. Stripped of all culture, wild men are mirror images of courtiers and enhance courtly status by supplying a supplement that completes a lack in courtly identity. Although it cannot do full justice to the richness of this book, I hope this brief description makes clear that there is something here for nearly everyone—whether scholars of English or French theater, history, art, or literature. Crane’s ability to juxtapose genres and representational media and to offer detailed thick descriptions of courtly culture without sacrificing interpretive nuance is simply astonishing. This brilliant study of aristocratic selfhood deserves a place on every medievalist’s bookshelf. Claire Sponsler University of Iowa Sheila Delany, ed. Chaucer and the Jews: Sources, Contexts, Meanings. New York: Routledge, 2002. Pp. xi, 258. Much recent work in Chaucer studies and in medieval studies has recognized the importance of Judaism and Jews for Christian ideology and culture. In Chaucer and the Jews, Sheila Delany collects fourteen essays that contribute to our understanding of how Chaucer’s representation of Jews is significant to his broader concerns as a Christian poet in England , from which Jews had been expelled in 1290. These essays are wide-ranging and of a generally high quality. While the first of the volume’s three parts considers primarily the Canterbury Tales, the remaining two take up non-Chaucerian materials that shed significant light on the Chaucerian corpus. Three of the five essays in ‘‘Part I: Chaucer Texts’’ have been previously published. Christine M. Rose’s ‘‘The Jewish Mother-in-Law: Synagoga and the Man of Law’s Tale’’ shows how medieval illustrators and writers (including Hildegard of Bingen) imagined Synagoga as ‘‘‘mother of the incarnation’ and . . . mother-in-law of the Christian Church’’ (p. 3). Rose then argues persuasively that we should associate PAGE 378 378 .......................... 10906$ CH11 11-01-10 13:59:32 PS REVIEWS this mother-in-law with the villainous mothers-in-law of The Man of Law’s Tale; as she suggests, that tale, ‘‘while overtly decrying the ‘law’ of the pagans and ‘Saracens,’ represents a veiled evocation of that other threat to Christian hegemony, the Jew’’ (p. 19). Delany’s own essay, ‘‘Chaucer’s Prioress, the Jews, and the Muslims,’’ might be seen as a companion piece to Rose’s, showing how the Asian locale of The Prioress’s Tale would have evoked Islam for late fourteenth-century readers. Sylvia Tomasch’s ‘‘Postcolonial Chaucer and the Virtual Jew’’ presents the volume ’s most theoretically challenging consideration of how Jewishness functions in Chaucer and in medieval culture. Using postcolonial and postmodern formulations, Tomasch argues that medieval Jews are made ‘‘virtual’’ within Christendom: ‘‘When we examine the virtual Jew . . . we see that it does not refer directly to any actual Jew, nor present an accurate depiction of one, nor even a faulty fiction of one; instead it ‘surrounds’ Jews with a ‘reality’ that displaces and supplants their actuality . . . . [W]herever in Western culture actual Jews come to reside, they encounter the phantom that follows and precedes them. By virtue of its virtuality, therefore, ‘the Jew’ maintains its frightful power’’ (p. 78). The volume’s two new essays on Chaucerian texts present materials interesting for reading local sites within the Canterbury Tales. The important historian of medieval Jewish-Christian interactions, William Chester Jordan, reflects in ‘‘The Pardoner’s ‘Holy Jew,’ ’’ on how the association of the Pardoner’s relics with Jews might affect our reading of the Pardoner’s larger performance. And Jerome Mandel, considering ‘‘‘Jewes werk’ in Sir Thopas,’’ concludes that the Jewish attribution of Thopas’s ‘‘hawberk’’ contributes to the tale’s ‘‘comic absudity’’ (p. 65). ‘‘Part III: Chaucer, Jews, and Us,’’ begins by reprinting Colin Richmond ’s provocatively polemical ‘‘Englishness and Medieval AngloJewry ,’’ which argues that to understand what it means to be English necessitates a grappling with England’s relationship to Jews...