Geoffrey Chaucer: An Introduction to His Narrative Poetry by Dieter Mehl (review)

STUDIBS IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER rative structure of the text. Moreover, presentation of the L and C texts in parallel format renders their differences immediately apparent, and her decision to provide modern punctuation and capitalization, to normalize the use ofj:J (where Thornton regularly usesy), and to restrict the apparatus criticus to only significant variants and/or corrections make for an unclut­ tered and readable page. Of significant value, too, is the invitation her edition now offers to advance ME romance scholarship more extensively into two important areas: the process of transmission in manuscripts show­ ing extensive variation which may indeed be scribally caused and not-as once heldby Baugh and others-evidence oforal presentation; and literary relationships between not onlyEnglish romances havingFrench sources but all those descending from the complex family separation and happy re­ union motif which was the legacy of late Greek romance. LAUREL BRASWELL-MEANS McMaster University DIETER MEHL. Geoffrey Chaucer: AnIntroduction to His Narrative Poetry. Cambridge, London, and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986. Pp. viii, 243. $32. 50. Anything by Dieter Mehl is sure to be worth reading, and the English version of his book on Chaucer has long been awaited. Mehl is probably most familiar to medievalists as the author of the groundbreaking Middle English Romances ofthe Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries, an indis­ pensable work that once and for all demonstrated the achievement of the native romance tradition. His Geoffrey Chaucer could hardly be so revolu­ tionary (we already recognize this poet's achievement); instead, as its subtitle states, it is designed as "an introduction" to Chaucer's narrative poetry and possesses the qualities of a good introduction: it is extremely well written, aware ofthecentral critical questions, undogmatic, andsound and sensible in its judgments. Mehl is in the tradition ofempirical literary analysis; rather than impose any theoretical model on Chaucer, he declares that his aim is "to invite the reader to enter into a critical dialogue with the text" (p. vii). Geoffrey Chaucer: An Introduction to His Narrative Poetry is a revised, expanded, and, of course, translated (apparently by the author himself) 174 REVIEWS version of Mehl's Geoffrey Chaucer: Eine Einfuhrung in seine erzi:ihlenden Dichtungen, published in 1973. The original book has not been wholly rewritten (Mehl says that the new work is "still very much a book of the early seventies" in its emphasis on the role of the reader and the conversational tone of Chaucer's poetry [p. vii]), but it does deal quite thoroughly with recent scholarship and has a new chapter on The LegendofGood Women. The book also includes a good up-to-date selective bibliography, though the brief annotations are frequently kind to a fault. Mehl repeatedly calls a study "useful" or "helpful" without indicating what the use or help might actually be. The first chapter, "Chaucer in His Time," is a rapid summary of what is known about the poet's life, though Mehl provides little detail and avoids most controversies. For example, we are told flatly that Chaucer was robbed once as Clerk of the King's Works, though some think he may have been robbed as many as three times, and there is no mention of Chaucer's connection with the raptus (about whose interpretation scholars differ) of Cecilia Chaumpaigne. Mehl's skill is as a literary interpreter, and his second chapter, "The Narrator and His Audience," discusses the poet's voice in his works, while avoiding the extremes of past criticism. We are shown the folly of identifying the "I" in Chaucer's poetry with the author himself yet also warned against the opposite error of trying "to separate the narrator completely from his creator" (p. 10). While acknowledging that the per­ sonal tone in Chaucer's verse is shared with that of his great fourteenth­ century English contemporaries, Mehl rightly tempers excessive Ricar­ dianism by insisting on Chaucer's uniqueness: "Chaucer is the first English poet to discuss his own literary activity and its particular problems in his poetry, the first to refer to his own works, and he could obviously assume his audience's familiarity with the large parts of his oeuvre" (p. 16). The next five chapters are...