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  • Dreams, Medicine, and Literary Practice: Exploring the Western Literary Tradition Through Chaucer by Tanya S. Lenz
  • Lola Sharon Davidson
Lenz, Tanya S., Dreams, Medicine, and Literary Practice: Exploring the Western Literary Tradition Through Chaucer (Cursor Mundi, 18), Turnhout, Brepols, 2014; hardback; pp. x, 212; 2 b/w illustrations; R.R.P. €70.00; ISBN 9782503534817.

The originality of this book purports to lie in its consideration of the role of medicine in Chaucer’s oeuvre. The connection between dreams and medicine having been lost in our modern era of scientific materialism, contemporary scholarship has largely ignored Chaucer’s frequent references to medicine and accordingly ‘no previous work has specifically addressed the poetic intersection of medicine and dreams in Chaucer’ (p. 17).

After a brief Introduction on the relationship between dreams and medicine in Greco-Roman antiquity and the Middle Ages, Tanya S. Lenz proceeds to an analysis of various poems, chronologically considered so as to bring out the development of the author’s reflection on his own literary practice. It is this reflection that emerges as the dominant theme of the book, with dreams and medicine providing the vehicles through which this meditation may be conducted. The works considered are the Book of the Duchess, the House of Fame, the Parliament of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, and the Nun’s Priest’s Tale from the Canterbury Tales. The first three are dream vision poems while the last three make extensive use of dreams. As for medicine, Chaucer does indeed reference the medical tradition, particularly as it enters into the continuing debate on the origin and truth of dreams as part of the broader field of conflicting claims to truth and epistemological certainty. Moreover, he is clearly learned in these matters. That said, it is essentially through metaphors of sickness and healing that medicine enters the text in service to the overriding literary concern.

The Duchess of the book of that name was John of Gaunt’s wife, Blanche of Lancaster, who, along with her father, sister, and mother-in-law, Queen Philippa, died of the plague. Terrible as the Black Death was, I find it difficult to credit the assertion that, ‘In England during the period of [End Page 252] 1348–50, between eighty and ninety per cent of the population died’ (p. 24). Putting that aside, Lenz makes a strong case that the inadequacy of medical knowledge to deal with the plague and the development of new theories of contagion in response to the catastrophe are an important theme of the poem. Lenz sees the contagion motif functioning even more strongly in Troilus and Criseyde where it is Pandarus who operates as the agent of contagion, infecting Criseyde with Troilus’s love-sickness. In both poems, Chaucer is seen to be playing with the Galenic theory of the humours as well as the conventions of courtly love. While modern literary scholars are familiar with the latter, they are probably far less acquainted with the former than Chaucer’s own audience would have been, so subtle references to it may well have been overlooked. With the House of Fame and the Parliament of Fowls, the focus is more purely on the ambivalent nature of literary practice, and its potential, like dreams, to mislead or inspire, to harm or to heal. Chaucer’s role as a translator made him particularly sensitive to the ethical issues involved in transmitting a tradition. In both the House of Fame, which explicitly addresses the dangers of writing, and the Prologue to the Legend of Good Women, he seems at times uneasy with the misogynist undertone of his sources.

Lenz’s own approach to translation is idiosyncratic and arbitrary. Short in-text translations generally receive a modern English translation, though not always. The many lengthier indented quotations are glossed with random words whose selection seems to defy all logic. The glosses are frequently similes for easily understood words while more obscure words in the quote are simply ignored. To give one instance, ‘comlynesse’ is glossed as ‘graciousness’ yet one sentence later we are told his ‘remarks concern her comely dancing, singing’ (pp. 40–41). If we...

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