Interpretation and Performance: Essays for Alan Gaylord ed. by Susan Yager, Elise E. Morse-Gagné (review)

Overuse in praise of a beloved former teacher and mentor has turned Chaucer’s comment about the Clerk’s willingness gladly to learn and gladly to teach into a cliché. But in the case of Alan Gaylord, the compliment is not a cliché; it is an apt description of a man who has clearly been an inspiring teacher more than willing to learn from his students and a generous scholar more than willing to share his insights with others, while encouraging them to pursue their own scholarly interests. Whether in the classroom at Michigan or Dartmouth or at conferences on both sides of the Atlantic, Gaylord has been a critical and scholarly presence to be reckoned with, not because he has been so formidable, but because he has been so kind. As the essays in this Festschrift repeatedly make abundantly clear, Alan Gaylord has always been the gentle guide, a genial Harry Bailey, if you will, for his students, and for those lucky enough to encounter him at scholarly gatherings.

In keeping with the reputation and the career of the man whom they seek to honor, the fourteen essays collected here by Susan Yager and Elise E. Morse-Gagné are both pedagogical and scholarly, and each represents an important contribution to the study of fields and methodologies dear to Gaylord’s heart. The essays are grouped under four headings: “Text and Intertext,” “Matters Metrical,” “The Moment of Teaching,” and “An Art Built on Invention.” This four-part division is, however, both helpful and not, as essays within different sections of this volume refer and react to each other, again in tribute to a man whose interests were many and whose mind was always open to new approaches and connections between literary and cultural topics.

Ann W. Astell begins this collection with an essay on The Prioress’s Tale. Her approach offers an interesting critical continuum, using as its methodology the exegetical approach popularized by Gaylord’s own teacher, D. W. Robertson Jr., certainly one of the dominant approaches in medieval literary studies when I was in graduate school in the early 1970s, and one that has curiously all but disappeared from the literary critical landscape, a fact commented upon, of course, knowingly by Gaylord in a 2006 essay in The Chaucer Review. What Astell proposes is a reading of The Prioress’s Tale based upon Gospel passages that are in turn based upon Psalm 8. Astel convincingly argues that medieval readers would have readily recognized such intertextuality and used it to reinforce their anti-Semitism. Far from excusing such anti-Semitism, Astell simply explains its depths and, in doing so, highlights the major disconnection, long acknowledged by many, between the portrait of the teller in The General Prologue and the vile tale she tells. Such a disconnection clearly emphasizes the facile sentimentality, rather than anything even remotely akin to piety and charity, that the Prioress exhibits.

Winthrop Wetherbee follows Astell with an essay that takes a decidedly different approach to another Chaucerian text. In almost a parody of the Prioress’s faux exegetical approach, Wetherbee reads Troilus’s expression of the climax of his love as a “hijacking” of St. Bernard’s prayer to the Virgin at the conclusion of Dante’s Paradisio. The intertexuality here raises any number of questions and is clearly of a different sort than that used in the tale of the Prioress. Troilus is misguided; the Prioress, something decidedly worse. Wetherbee finds answers to the questions he raises about what Chaucer is suggesting concerning Troilus’s state of mind at this point and elsewhere in the poem by a careful analysis of the pattern of end-rhymes in Chaucer’s romance, paying special attention to the poet’s use of place and grace as a rhyming pair.

Thomas H. Ohlgren offers an example of yet a third kind of intertexuality by taking us, it...