Höfisch-ritterliche Dichtung und sozialhistorische Realität: Literatursoziologische Studien zum Verhältnis von Adelsstruktur, Ritterideal und Dichtung bei Geoffrey Chaucer by Ursula Schaefer (review)

REVIEWS The editing and proofreading in this volume leave much to be desired. Punctuation is erratic, inconsistent, and confusing. Blatant errors and awkward passages abound. Even the index is incomplete and unreliable, most strikingly so, perhaps, in its omission of several refer­ ences to Tolkien himself. All this suggests some serious breakdown in the usual process that sees a manuscript through the press. In short, not everything in this volume would bring equal joy to Professor Tolkien, but the best essays in it are excellent, and they would honor any man. EMERSON BROWN, ]R. Vanderbilt University URSULA SCHAEFER, Hofisch-ritterliche Dichtung und sozialhistorische Realitat: Literatursoziologische Studien zum Verhaltnis von Adelsstruktur, Ritter­ ideal und Dichtung bei Geoffrey Chaucer. Neue Studien zur Anglistik und Americanistik, 10. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1977. Pp. 397. The title of this monograph might lead the reader to expect a study of the relationships between Chaucer's ambivalent treatment of chivalric ideals and the actual sociological circumstances of the courtly segment of his audience. Such integrative studies are clearly needed at this point in Chaucer scholarship. Schaefer's book, however, which reads like a rather rigidly conceiveddoctoral dissertation, is a relatively restrained example of the new "literary sociology" now fashionable in German universities. The author is a member of the English Seminar at Freiburg who has studied with Willi Erzgraber. A cautious, well-informed student of Chaucer, she has made an earnest attempt to apply Erich Kohler's ideas about medieval French literature to Chaucer's narrative poetry. 1 In brief, Schaefer's argument runs thus: The social structure of the English nobility in the fourteenth century was different from twelfth­ and thirteenth-century France and Germany, where the courtly ideal originated. It is important to emphasize the difference, since the concep­ tual universe ("Sinnwelt") of the courtly-knightly ideal is a "social 1 Especially Erich Kohler, Ideal und Wirklichkeit in der hifischen Epik: Studien zur Form derfriihen Artus- und Graldichtung. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift fiir romanische Philologie, 97 (Tiibingen, 1956; 2nd ed., 1970). 207 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER construction" which comes not only from poetic tradition but also from historical reality. When historical realities differ, their conceptual uni­ verses will also differ. Chaucer recognized the discrepancy in fourteenth­ century England between the historical situation of the nobles and the literary ideal of knighthood. In his work, especially Troilus and The Knight's Tale, there is a dialectical tension between an outmoded literary ideal of courtly life (i.e., the conceptual universes of Troilus, Palamon, Arcite) and a new, more pragmatic courtly reality, expressed in the "Sinnwelten" of Criseyde and Theseus. The uniqueness of Chaucer's poetry lies in his demonstration of the collision of these two different worlds of thought and in his attempt to resolve the conflict between them. There are not many new points of historical interpretation in Schae­ fer's exposition of this argument, and very few primary historical sources. She relies mainly on standard works by May McKissack, K. B. Mcfarlane, and Noel Denholm-Young for her definitions of class, and her bibliography is deficient in recent British work done on late four­ teenth-century social and economic history. Her literary interpretations of Chaucer's texts do not usually rise above the competent rehearsal of recent critical positions stretched upon the frame of Kohler's argument. The proportions of the book are somewhat disconcerting as well. Chap­ ters 1 and 2 offer an historical sketch of the nobility, knighthood, and their ideals in both Europe and England (based mainly on secondary sources), and brief discussions of sociological theory and the question of "courtly love," all in less than a hundred pages. In Chapter 3, one hundred and forty-three pages are devoted to a discussion of Troilus and "the tragedy of the courtly-knightly conceptual universe." The fourth chapter (and last third) of the book discusses The Book ofthe Duchess and The Parliament ofFowls cursorily (Huppe and Robertson's Fruyt and Cha/ is not even mentioned in her bibliography), and at more leisure explores the notions of gentilesse to be seen in the Wife of Bath, the Franklin, their tales, and The Knight's Tale. The limitations of her sociological method can...