Chaucer and Clothing: Clerical and Academic Costume in the General Prologue to the “Canterbury Tales” by Laura F. Hodges (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER supported by dense scholarship and illustrated with a wealth of fascinating plates. Its argumentation is ingenious and often entertaining, and it has much to teach even those well versed in the period. I was particularly intrigued by its account of Hardyng’s back-to-front diagram (Hiatt flatters it by calling it a map) of Northern Scotland; it conjures up the Pythonesque image of a Yorkist army, armed with Hardyng’s directions, getting itself hopelessly lost in the Scottish Highlands—an opportunity for speculative reception that Hiatt wisely resists. Since The Making of Medieval Forgeries does not set out to be a comprehensive survey of its subject, it is perhaps rather churlish to complain about the topics it does not cover, but readers should be warned that this is very much a study of intellectual forgery—forgery, as it were, from above. They will search in vain for the grubbier manifestations of the forger’s vocation—the erasures, the interlinings, the overwritings, that form part of the stock in trade of men like the Chancery clerk William Brocket, who tampered with an Inquisition post mortem in 1432. My only serious complaint is that there is an occasional slipperiness in Hiatt’s use of terminology. The word antiquarian, for instance, is frequently used to describe the historical researches of men seeking to bolster the legal interests, the prestige, or the political advantage of institutions with which they were associated , yet antiquarian surely suggests research that is driven primarily by a disinterested passion for the past—naive and uncritical certainly, but not, as here, grossly partisan. By this definition, William of Worcester (or John Leland, William Lambarde, and John Stowe) are antiquarians, but John Hardyng is certainly not. Even more crucially, the word forgery itself is used in a wide variety of meanings—a facsimile, a speculative re-creation, or a creative embellishment, are quite as likely to be labeled forgery as full-blown documentary fraud. But that, I suppose, when one comes to think of it, is Hiatt’s whole point. Richard Firth Green The Ohio State University Laura F. Hodges. Chaucer and Clothing: Clerical and Academic Costume in the General Prologue to the ‘‘Canterbury Tales.’’ Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2005. Pp. xiv, 316. $90.00. This second of two volumes on Chaucer’s use of clothing in his General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales provides invaluable information about PAGE 300 300 ................. 16094$ CH17 11-01-10 14:05:08 PS REVIEWS how the attire worn by Chaucer’s pilgrims might have been understood by Chaucer and his contemporaries. The earlier volume, published by D. S. Brewer in 2000, offered a thorough and illuminating contextualization of the secular pilgrims’ clothing, and in so doing challenged certain long-standing critical notions, such as the transgressive nature of the Wife of Bath’s scarlet hose and the Miller’s blue hood and weapons. This book resumes the discussion—and the critical dismantling—in the context of the pilgrims associated with holy orders and universities, a list that comprises, in the order in which Hodges addresses them, the Prioress, the Monk, the Friar, the Clerk, the Physician, the Pardoner, the Summoner, and the Parson. It also inhabits the same methodological space as the earlier volume, as Hodges scrutinizes what she calls Chaucer’s ‘‘costume rhetoric’’ (p. 3), or his manipulation of the intricate code of late fourteenth-century costume signs and their associations, through her own systematic investigation of that code in historical and legal documents, visual art and artifacts, literature, and religious rules. In its critical and bibliographical scope, rigor, and substance, this book, along with the first installment of Chaucer and Clothing, makes a considerable contribution to both Chaucer studies and costume studies. The author begins her study with a discussion of the discrepancy between the ideal attire of religious orders and their actual dress practices. Surveying religious rules, sumptuary laws, literary complaints, and historical records, Hodges’s first chapter finds much evidence supporting the idea that transgressions of religious attire were a growing problem, but one that in practice seems to have enjoyed a certain amount of tolerance. While religious rules concentrate on the proper...