The Cambridge Introduction to Chaucer by Alastair Minnis (review)

Throughout The Cambridge Introduction to Chaucer, Alastair Minnis strives to capture Chaucer’s caginess. Minnis establishes the challenges of introducing the notoriously hard-to-pin-down poet early on by quoting “Geffrey,” the narrator of The House of Fame: “I wot myself best how y stonde” (HF, 1878). To this Minnis responds, “That statement of extraordinary self-sufficiency and self-containment, which hides more than it reveals, is as close as we can get to Chaucer” (11). The book’s “Introduction” quickly explicates Chaucer’s life and historical context, paying special attention to the poet’s political and religious connections. Subsequent chapters progress more or less chronologically through Chaucer’s literary career, moving from the earlier dream-visions to the roman antique of Troilus and Criseyde and The Legend of Good Women, and finally transitioning to the Canterbury Tales via The Knight’s Tale. The core of the book is the two chapters on the Canterbury Tales. The two chapers consider the individual tales along roughly generic and thematic lines. A brief afterword, notes section, and index complement Minnis’s critical readings. In lieu of a bibliography, he provides an extensive, annotated “Further Reading” section divided into topics that range from book history and biography to animal studies and afterlives.

Chapter 1 offers extended treatments of each of Chaucer’s dreamvisions. In contrast to The Book of the Duchess and The Parliament of Fowls, The House of Fame demonstrates Chaucer’s willingness to “admit, and indeed to create, discordia” (34). The artistically confident Chaucer of The House of Fame, though, is concerned with “textual authority rather than socio-political authority” (34). Minnis’s enjoyment of The House of Fame shines through when he declares, “The English poet has caused the pillars of textual authority to tremble and invited us to enjoy the spectacle” (26). He concludes this chapter with the important point that “class distinctions and stereotypes have been made the object of mirth, but that does not make them any less stable” (34).

Chapter 2 examines Troilus and Criseyde and The Legend of Good Women as “fictions of antiquity.” The pagan past gives Chaucer space to think about issues of salvation, desire, and the gendering of ethical action. Troy, a “world all its own” filled with the possibility of virtue and “intricate philosophical analysis,” is also the world of “fearful Criseyde,” who is subject to exchange at the hands of a patriarchal gift economy. In considering Chaucer’s rather sympathetic portrait of Criseyde, Minnis establishes an important through-line first raised in the book’s introduction: Chaucer’s depictions of women. Indeed, if the “other worlds” of the Troilus and the Legend are sites to think of pagan otherness, that cultural and historical otherness is grounded in female otherness. In the Legend Minnis finds a Chaucer who “takes great pains to protect the reputations of the … good pagan women” (55). In counterpoint to the possible “proto-feminist gestures” of the Legend, Minnis nevertheless returns to the issue of textual authority raised in the first chapter, asking whether Chaucer’s concerns were: “predominantly, inevitably, literary?” (57). He concludes that the tension between the depiction of good pagan women and the deployment of that depiction to demonstrate poetic facility and authority is one that Chaucer “left as a matter for debate. One that continues even now” (57).

Matters of making and interpretation are key to the following two chapters, in which Minnis discusses the Canterbury Tales. He carefully connects Chaucer’s poetic work to philosophical questions about perception, knowledge, and the nature of things. Chapter 3, “The Canterbury Tales, I: War, Love, and Laughter,” gives us sections on The Knight’s Tale; the Squire, Sir Thopas, and the Franklin; the Shipman, Miller, Reeve, Cook, and Merchant; and The Nun’s Priest’s Tale and The Manciple’s Tale. Minnis’s reading of The Manciple’s Tale concludes the first Canterbury Tales chapter, an appropriately mimetic choice too, considering that the Manciple offers his story in the spirit...