The Isle of Ladies or The Isle of Pleasaunce ed. by Anthony Jenkins (review)

REVIEWS Chaucer would never have intended to show a return journey on the Canterbury pilgrimage, and that therefore the Tales is substantially finished. The literary idea of pilgrimage in the Middle Ages, as distinct from the real experience, did not involve a return journey; pilgrimage was conceived and written about as a one-way journey to a destination. No pilgrimage narrative written before the late fifteenth century re­ counts the return. Consequently Howard can claim here that Chaucer's idea of The Canterbury Tales is in one of its facets an idea of genre. One may cavil at the inclusiveness of Howard's generic category, which appears to define genre by subject matter; some may dispute the proprie­ ty of joining non-fictionalpilgrimagenarratives with fictional stories, of rememberedsightsand marvels in the Holy Land with remembered tales told on the road to Canterbury; those with even modest anxieties about influence may prefer more evidence that Chaucer had read any pilgrim­ age narratives besides Mandeville's. But even dissenters must agree that Howard's book does Chaucer studies a service by focusing attention on the genre of The Canterbury Tales, and by opening a debate that should provide us with new generic measures of Chaucer's achievement. PENN R. SZIT1YA Georgetown University ANTHONYJENKINS, ed., The Isle ofLadies or The Isle ofPleasaunce. Garland Medieval Texts, Number 2. New York and London: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1980. Pp. 193. $20.00. This book contains a new edition of the text of The Isle ofLadies (about 70 pages), together with an introduction, notes, and glossary. It is most welcome to have a new edition of this poem: the only other 'modern' text was produced by Jane B. Scherzer in 1903, and is not available in some major libraries. Professor Jenkins has made a new transcription of the poem from the earliest manuscript (Longleat 256), and has provided variant readings from B.L. Addit. 10303 and Speght's Chaucer of 1598. If he had done no more than this he would have deserved our gratitude: the poem badly needs more discussion and Professor Jenkins has now given us the necessary starting point. I have not been able to check the 165 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER accuracy of his transcription, but a check on the variants from Speght revealed no mistakes. The poem is a love-allegory, and a curious one. The sixteenth-century editors called it Chaucer's Dream, and Speght maintained that it de­ scribed the courtship of John of Gaunt and Blanche of Lancaster. Critics for the last hundred years have spent their energies on trying to find another couple at a later date who would fit the circumstances described in the poem, or with trying to isolate other features which would provide us with clues to the date and provenance of the work. It survives only in late and somewhat corrupt copies, and any linguistic clues to its date are obscured by the process of transmission. Professor Jenkins tackles all these problems in his edition. He takes his text from the oldest manuscript, emends it sparingly, provides substantive variants from the other witnesses, and adds a lengthy intro­ duction and some notes. His main interest, however, is in the literary merits and context ofthe work: the bulk of the introduction and many of the notes discuss the poet's style and felicities of expression, and the poem's place in the development of late medieval allegory. But it is very hard to keep such questions separate from the problems of text and date, and some of Professor Jenkins's discussions reveal the difficulty. For instance, page 15 of the introduction is devoted to the poet's use of pronouns: Professor Jenkins argues that a "distinct clue" to the date of the poem lies in his handling of the second person pronouns. The poet of The Isle of Ladies preserves the distinction between the second person singular and plural very carefully-but then the same distinction is observed in The Court of Sapience, Morte Darthur, and The Pastime of Pleasure. He argues, in addition, that the poet carefully distinguishes between the nominative and accusative forms of these pronouns (ye/you and thou/thee...