Chaucer’s Language and the Philosophers’ Tradition by J. D. Burnley (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER ]. D. BURNLEY, Chaucer's Language and the Philosophers' Tradition. Chaucer Studies, vol. 2. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer; Totowa, N.J.: Rowman and Littlefield, 1979. Pp. ix, 196. $30.00. By finding the language of moral philosophy in Chaucer's poetry, J. D. Burnley recovers a domain of affective Christian values (mainly patience, compassion, and pity) resting uneasily between stoical ethics and peniten­ tially focused analyses of vice and virtue. He does this by explicating the tyrant topos, giving us its lexicon and its sometimes surprising transforma­ tions, along with the lexicon of its antitypes. Here Burnley does all medievalists a service. But, given the title ofhis study, Burnley, ofcourse, would go further: by showing the presence of that moral vocabulary in Chaucer's poetry, he addresses the Chaucerian critic especially and joins such scholars asJudson Allen (A Distinction ofSton·es, Columbus: Ohio University Press, 1981) in suggesting the moral function of characters and the ethically exemplaryfunction oftales. When Burnley turns to Chaucer, however, he shifts from strength to weakness-this because of a naYve literary insinuation: that the appearance ofa moral vocabulary in appropri­ ate poetical contexts becomes prima facie evidence of Chaucer's moral direction. Stated so baldly, that insinuation could hardly appeal to so undogmatica scholaras Burnley. But it nevertheless is the evil genius in his method-despite his disclaimer that he will not interpret Chaucer, hoping only to trace the presence of a moral-philosophical vocabulary and, per­ haps, here and there suggest the direction an interpretation might take. Ofcourse, Burnley's literary sins diminish or not given one's own sense of Chaucer'spoetry.For me,Burnley'spervasiveconflationofthings narrators say with Chaucer's own, morally unmediated voice; his seeming indif­ ference to immediate literary contexts; and his sublimely flat sense ofvoice and rhetorical stance-these breed poor readings, as occasionally does Burnley's insistence on the tyrant topos. One example, a just one, I hope, will have to suffice. Because the language of saintly prudence includes "pacient," "stable," "ferme," "stedefast," "constant," "sad," "symple," "benygne," and "wys" or "rype," Burnley can explore the ironies generated by the application of that language to a notoriously unstable subject­ Criseyde and her "slydynge of corage." Ignoring the immediate narrator context-the curious resort just here to parallel effictio-Burnley seizes on "slydynge" in the same spirit that earlier guided his focus on "sodeyn" 156 REVIEWS (though the narrator insisted that Criseyde did not love Troilus suddenly). He convicts Criseyde of negating the ideals of moral philosophy, thus becoming "an example of instability" (p. 95). Surely Criseyde is more than this. Insecure, unsure, and eventually disastrously yielding to Diomede, yes, but she is also "sobre," "symple," and "wys" in the very portrait that ends on "slydynge of corage." The irony and the pity here are not simple: perhaps she is too tender of heart. The narrator avoids telling us exactly how Diomede "bereaves" Criseyde of all her pain, and surely her portrait is not that of a tyrant's. To make her a tyrant figure, Burnley must see her as superficial in her virtues and trivial in her actions. Only then can she become something transparent, rather than an enigma-someone whose actions cast doubt on all of our certainties, the moral among them. The medieval tyrant figure embodies passion, cruelty, injustice, and heartlessness (no room, apparently, for a benign tyrant). Its antitype is first that of the rationally guided moral philosopher (Seneca)-who exercises prudence and temperance. For Boethius, Gower, Chaucer, and others, the Senecan type gives way to the prudential but compassionate man, with the possibility here extended into an affective psychology in which intent is the key to virtue. The first chapter reconstructs the tyrant topos. As a moral symbol, the tyrant indicates a disordered body politic and a king "oppressed by fierce and unrestrained passions" (p. 17). Thus the metaphorical transference of thetoposto any strong passion becomes possible, Burnley argues, allowing Chaucer to use the topos in love, marriage, and parent-child contexts as well as in judicial ones. Burnley's linguistic method-identifying colloca­ tions of words that characterize thetopos- allows him to find aspects of the tyrant figure in...