Approaches to Teaching Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales.” ed. by Peter W. Travis, Frank Grady (review)

The title of Peter Travis and Frank Grady’s volume declares its goals, its value, and its audience. The book is designed for those who seek advice about teaching the Canterbury Tales, and, as one might expect from its seasoned editors, it offers a great deal of learned counsel. Travis and Grady have gathered thirty-five able contributors, authored the book’s introduction, and provided essential editorial matter, all the while keeping the tome sleek and affordable. Their efforts are to be commended.

Approaches to Teaching Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales”is divided into two parts: the editors’ concise exposition of “materials” available to teachers of the Canterbury Tales, and a collection of thirty-five “approaches” that span the scope of traditional and contemporary thinking about Canterbury Talespedagogy, followed by a brief “Afterword.” I found the individual contributions more or less congenial to my thinking, but to offer subjective evaluations of what are by design brief essays multiplicitous in their perspectives would be to miss the point of so inclusive a volume. As Chaucer sagely observed, “Diverse folk diversely they demed” ( SqT, 202), and given the enormous variety of the contributions, different readers are likely to find different chapters helpful in thinking about their own pedagogy. I direct my attention to describing the range of what readers will discover in the volume.

The “materials” tallied by Travis and Grady in nineteen succinct pages include popular editions (Middle English, translations, and anthologies, as suggested by an extensive survey of Chaucer instructors); recommended reading suitable for undergraduates; teaching aids (websites, audio and visual materials, and electronic and multimedia resources); and a basic instructor’s library of background studies, reference works, and essential criticism. To be sure, the editors assigned themselves an impossible task. In the current unstable marketplace, some of the material is already outdated: The Riverside Chauceris no longer available in the United States, videos and other electronic resources have been abandoned and superseded (the Chaucer Studio recordings being a much appreciated exception), and many websites are maintained sporadically if at all (the Middle English Dictionaryand Harvard Chaucer Page continuing as welcome exceptions). Moreover, readers are likely to question some of the editors’ decisions as to which collections, critical studies, and approaches are essential: much fine scholarship is left unmentioned. This said, Travis and Grady have performed a valuable service in consolidating an abundance of detailed and specific information into under twenty easily readable pages.

The substance of the volume lies in its thirty-five three- to six-page essays on critical “approaches,” which the editors have organized into five sections, introduced by a “Survey of Pedagogical Approaches.” “Chaucer’s Language” includes contributions by Peter G. Beidler, William Quinn, Howell Chickering, Jane Chance, Tara Williams, and Andrew Cole, each of whom explains the practical value in some form of close reading. Most helpful to my mind are the two essays that treat Chaucer as poet: Quinn’s elegant survey of Chaucer’s various verse forms, and Chickering’s clean, simple account of how he teaches Chaucer’s prosody.

The ten chapters in “Individual Tales and Fragments” span the Canterbury Talesto constitute the book’s longest section. The section is headed by Robert J. Meyer-Lee’s pithy exploration of the manuscript bases and interpretive consequences for the opposed approaches to tale order promoted by Lee Patterson (the work is “structurally whole”) and Derek Pearsall (“Chaucer’s design for its structure” was “manifestly provisional”) (67). An assortment of ethically directed models on how instructors may promote students’ intellectual involvement with the substance of the Talesis offered in essays by Roger A. Ladd and Alexander L. Kaufman (both on The General Prologue’s middle-class professions), Nicole Nolan Sidhu (on confronting Fragment I’s “obscene comedy”), Michael Calabrese (on the centrality of The Man of Law’s Tale), Emma Lipton (on teaching marriage post-Kittredge), Travis (on the...