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STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Testament models of marriage, it seems more likely that this is a faulty use of the phrase ‘‘Church fathers’’ than a misunderstanding of Augustine ’s point, but it should nonetheless have been caught and corrected in the copy-editing process. In the conclusion to the book, McCarthy briefly considers the interesting question of how legal and social practices relating to marriage might be influenced by literary representations, while acknowledging that such influence is inevitably ‘‘subtler’’ and ‘‘more difficult to trace’’ than influences in the opposite direction (p. 162). He also returns to the important theme of the simultaneous continuities, tensions, and outright contradictions within medieval marital norms and practices. Indeed , this may be the most valuable lesson, whether new or simply a refresher course, that readers can take away from Marriage in Medieval England: those who seek to understand medieval marriage fully must take into account a very wide variety of source material, auctoritees, and expressions of experience, and must listen most carefully to the many voices that ‘‘speke of mariage’’ in the period. M. Teresa Tavormina Michigan State University Mark Miller. Philosophical Chaucer: Love, Sex, and Agency in the ‘‘Canterbury Tales.’’ Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Pp. x, 289. $75.00. In Philosophical Chaucer, Mark Miller takes the familiar—Chaucer’s indebtedness to Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy and Jean de Meun’s Romance of the Rose, the role of sex, gender, and sexuality in some of the best known of the Canterbury Tales, as well as the problem of agency and normativity more generally—only to re-present it in profoundly defamiliarizing and challenging ways. In particular, Miller argues that Chaucer’s interest in love is fundamentally an interest in the structures of practical reason, agency, and the drive to autonomy, not so much the abstract articulation of philosophical problems as the ways people inhabit ‘‘what we might call the affective and political life of philosophical problems.’’ In the process, Miller forces a revaluation of how and why we should think of Chaucer’s poetry as philosophical by focusing our PAGE 306 306 ................. 16094$ CH17 11-01-10 14:05:10 PS REVIEWS attention on how Chaucer uses the forms of literary representation to investigate the dialectical structure of thought and desire. Chapter 1 begins in medias res with a powerful and compelling close reading of ‘‘the natural’’ in The Miller’s Tale. The Miller may seek to ‘‘quite’’ the Knight (and his emphasis on a deliberative rationality) by making the normativity of ‘‘the natural’’ seem self-evident and adequate such that there can be no practical function left for reason to play. But while this argument for a normative naturalism targets the Knight, it also, paradoxically, implies that the actions represented by the Knight and his characters are either impossible or not perverse, since if they did exist they would be part of nature. The Miller’s way of addressing the problem of ethical normativity is to wish that it could never have arisen, a nostalgic longing for an ‘‘animal’’ or ‘‘childlike’’ condition, which, from the Miller’s own point of view, never was and never could have been. Moreover, his nostalgic way of holding to such a theory does as much to undermine his own sense of normative gender and sexuality as to support it, for a worry about secrecy, however muted by the Miller’s loud avowals of carelessness , is a structural product of the way he responds to the problem of normativity . . . . One powerful form that the Miller’s longing for a state of carefree animality takes, then, is something like a phenomenology of the closet, a relationship to a territory of secrecy which he is committed to saying does not exist and cannot matter, and which has the hold it does on him precisely by virtue of the way he seeks to deny it. (pp. 55–56) The chapter concludes with a brilliant analysis of the effeminizing consequences of the Miller’s identification with Alisoun—perfect exemplar of the human even as she also serves as the purely passive object of male desire—and the interpenetration of such a shameful and desirable effeminacy with a wish for...

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