A Chaucer Glossary comp. by Norman Davis, et al. (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Chaucer's characteristic and pervasive 1romes may be lost on non­ Anglophone readers. Words such as wandrynge and wey are heavily charged words in the tradition ofreligious writings in English. Without some indication that wander here may mean errare ('This is the Wander­ ing Wood, this Error's den": FQ, I, i, 13), and that way may echo "I am the way, the truth, and the life" (john, xiv, 6), or anticipate the Parson's promise (X, 49-51) to show his fellow Canterbury pilgrims "the wey, in this viage, / Ofthilke parfit glorious pilgrymage I That highteJerusalem celestial," non-English speakers will still be left very much in the dark about the full meaning of Chaucer's text. The notes Professor Caluwe-Dor provides are certainly pertinent and informative. I would hope that in projected future volumes she might consider expanding them to embrace some of the issues raised above, and, perhaps, that her publisher might be persuaded to move them from the back of the book to the foot ofthe page, where their value for a reader struggling to understand details of Chaucer's text without losing his sense of its linear coherence would be immeasurably increased. Such an expansion of the critical apparatus would make for a considerably more ambitious undertaking than that attempted in this first volume, and it is perhaps unwarranted partisanship to expect that as much might be done in the way of carefully annotated translation to make Chaucer accessible in French as has been done, for example, to make Dante accessible in English. The present translation certainly constitutes a step in the right direction. Let us hope that one ofits effects will be to create a demand for more endeavors ofthis kind, and a consciousness ofwhat, ideally, might still further be achieved. ROY ]. PEARCY University of Oklahoma NORMAN DAVIS, Douglas Gray, Patricia Ingham, and Anne Wallace­ Hadrill, comps., A Chaucer Glossary. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979. Pp. xx, 185. Paper $8.95. Cloth $19.95. For its size and scope, Oxford's new Chaucer Glossary is nearly perfect. Having the easy feel of a short paperback novel, it is clearly more 134 REVIEWS convenient than the multivolumed OED, the MED, or Samuel Singer's three-volume Sprichw?irter des Mittelalters (1944-47). It is also much easier to use than Francis Henry Stratmann's Middle English Dictionary (rev. Henry Bradley, 1891), which covers authors other than Chaucer and, besides being fairly inaccessible, has formidable Old English­ looking forms and spellings for the main entries. Remarkably, the coverage in A Chaucer Glossary seems almost as full as that in Skeat's excellent but hard-to-come-by glossary (1894), and the crisp format is also similar to Skeat's,consisting of ME term, part of speech, definition, specific representative references to Chaucer's text with shades of mean­ ing carefully delineated, and etymology. The large number of main entries and textual references are the book's best feature, and Chaucer students-undergraduate, graduate, and post-doctoral as well-will find the glossary extremely useful for many years to come. Given the limited size of the book, it is hard to imagine a more useful glossary. However, the glossaries in the leading classroom texts will still be needed. The student will find some entries in the glossary in Robin­ son's text that the Oxford glossary does not have (rendren, wele 'happi­ ness,' wyerdes), and Robinson has more cross-references to variant forms-a very important feature for anyone but a senior Chaucer scholar. In the Oxford glossary, the student will have difficulty finding wonden, wissh, welk, or bontee, whereas Robinson has cross-references to wynden, washen, walken, and bountee. In the Oxford glossary, no main entry will tell him that wollen is a form of wile, that wiltow is a contraction of wilt thou, or that borugh is a variant of borwe 'surety.' The glossary in Baugh's text has a surprising number of specific line references and is a useful complement to Robinson if the Oxford glossary is not at hand. (The Oxford glossary, though, often has two or three times more references than Baugh.) Baugh's glossary is...