Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds ed. by Robert P. Miller (review)

REVIEWS matter and some structural elements of romantic medieval literature passed through Muslim hands before reaching the West and were due to Christian contact with Muslim spheres of culture. (pp. 242-43) And to define by citing a perfect instance, the plot of Floris and Blanche­ flur is briefly summarized. There is no analogue in Arabic fiction for this romance. Yet, whatever its origin, "it is so genuine a reflection of life in an Islamic environment that even a biographical account of the seventh­ century Arab poet 'Urwah, which describes young love, has been cited as one of its analogues." The "romances of prys" that Chaucer satirized contain much of the matter of Araby that Chaucer used himself. As The Squire's Tale shows, he roo considered the matter of Araby as the quintessence of "romance" which, in the relation of teller and tale, was to express the "romantic" young Squire as much as the youth's association with love and the month of May. The theme of Sir Beues, nevertheless, reflects the most vital and fateful subject of its time-the meeting of Islam and Christianity. What has happened is that romance has moved from the strictly confined terrirory of Arthurian legend into the historical and geographical frame of the whole known contemporary world, from the British Isles to Egypt to Damascus. The making of medieval romance was thus a historical enter­ prise which developed side by side with intellectual pursuits of the highest sophistication and political events of the highest complexity, all centered on the assimilation of the legacy of Islam. (p. 249). The two pages of carefully prepared maps are very helpful. The text is well illustrated by a frontispiece reproduced from a fourteenth-century painting on the ceiling of the Sala de los Reyes in the Alhambra and by reproductions from contemporary manuscripts. Altogether, this is an excellent and a well-prpduced book; though, in the absence of a bibliog­ raphy, one could have wished for a fuller and more complete index. EDGAR HILL DUNCAN Vanderbilt University ROBERT P. MILLER, ed., Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds. New York: Oxford University Press, 1977. Pp. xv, 507. Cloth $15.95; Paper $7.95. The teacher of Chaucer can utilize several valuable supplemental texts to assist in imparting a sense of the cultural and intellectual background in which the poet lived and composed. The past three 187 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER decades have seen a number ofsuch texts, and the few that have survived have become staples for undergraduate-and in some schools-graduate courses onEngland's first great poet. Beryl Rowland's collection of essays covers such biographical topics as the records in Chaucer's life, and such thematic approaches to the entirety of his work as rhetoric, debt to the classics, and symbolism. Several collections of critical essays are avail­ able, and though I have not seen specific sales data, the Schoeck and Taylor volumes are probably the most successful. With medieval authors and their literature, source studies are crucial, but in this respect no adequate and relatively inexpensive text exists. The Bryan and Dempster Sources and Analogues is still standard, but is now beginning to show its age. In an article seldom mentioned and almost never read, Francis Lee Utley seriously questioned several ofthe Bryan-Dempster assumptions, particularly with regard to our attitudes toward oral sources qua oral sources: "Some Implications of Chaucer's Folktales," Laographia, 22 ( 1965). Finally, the Sources and Analogues, however helpful one may find it, is not available in inexpensive enough editions to be used in the classroom. Bryan-Dempster very usefully prints the texts, often the entire text, of narratives which Chaucer may have redacted. But other sources, of ideas particularly, are harder to anthologize and have probably for this reason been relegated to such supplements as French's Handbook and the footnotes of editions. Now we have Robert P. Miller's Chaucer: Sources and Backgrounds to fill this genuine need. It is a collection ofwriting-narratives, treatises, biographies, com­ mentaries, letters, poems, sermons, even selections from Chaucer's own writing-covering a surprisingly broad spectrum of medieval thought. Miller has arranged his material by subject: medieval literary theory, "Marriage...