The Canterbury Tales and the Good Society by Paul A. Olson (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER in order to salvage the image of an anonymous figure whose authority is merely suggested, and never tested" (p. 72). Miller's book would have benefited, I think, from a more specific focus on the poets' relation to literary authority. As it is, her chapters cover too wide a range of issues-on which, however, she has many interesting things to say. J. A. BURROW Bristol University PAUL A. OLSON. The Canterbury Tales and the Good Society. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986. Pp. xix, 323. $35.50. Many years ago, a light-hearted question asked of me at my Yale Ph.D. oral examination-doubtless meant to relax the nervous candidate-was: with which of Chaucer's Canterbury pilgrims would Chaucer himself have been in most sympathy? The correct answer was deemed to be the Wife of Bath. This answer is wrong and Olson's book not only shows why this is so, but it also demonstrates the great success an author can have in reading the Tales within their historical (and linguistic) context. Olson's book waslong in the making, interrupted by years during which his attention was turned else­ where, not least for theU.S. Office of Education, where he set to reforming the education of teachers of English in public schools along with the curriculum. But he returned to scholarship to write a book of immense learning, worn lightly, a serious book about a serious poet with serious political concerns. And to this reviewer's mind, it turns students of The Canterbury Tales back to the texts and to the founeenth century in England, where minds ought, once again, to be turned. Olson provides an analysis of genre, structure and intellectual milieu for The Canterbury Tales and has some imponant things to say about Chau­ cer'simmediate court environment for which the poet providedhis discus­ sions of current social, literary and religious issues. Olson argues that Chaucer'slanguage is languageabout society-about its estates and ranks, its laws and institutions, its social obligations and perceived violations. It is not clear to whom Olson is referring when he says there are current readers who assume Chaucer's poetry to be detached from the issues of his day, and that Chaucer's use of specific names, dates and events is regarded as 180 REVIEWS "mere"(?) realism or exotic decoration. But whoever amongst us reads The Canterbury Tales in an acontextual "structuralist" manner, is gently put back on the right track, not least by an appendix entitled: "A Note on the Relationship of Meaning and Historical Forms ofLife." Nor should we be attracted to the anachronistic enterprise ofreconstructing Chaucer's mean­ ing by imposing a prion· meaning, patristic or modern, finding, for in­ stance, in eighteenth-century literature the same views supposedly main­ tained by Chaucer. The attempt that should be pursued, with all its difficulties acknowledged, is that ofan analysis ofChaucer's language from within the linguistic and semiotic system available to him and the court for which he wrote. The competing contemporary alternatives to Chaucer's views are seen to have been proposed by those who propounded the Order ofthe Passion, who argued for the Peasants' Revolt, who proposed the lives offriars ormonks as mostperfect, whoargued in favor ofthe Roman papacy or the English hierarchy, those who sided with Wycliffites or with absolute monarchists. Each alternative to Chaucer's solution for perceived social ills had its own idealism and its own practical violation of that idealism. Chaucer's world was, in many ways, a crumbling world, a disordered socialandreligiousworld, which actively sought amelioration ofitsdistress. And the pilgrims ofthe Tales talk from their variedstances and ranks about this disorder and how to put it right. The Canterbury Tales, we are told, "are a simulated conversation designed to promote court conversation and reading and rereading." It is, among other things, an estate journey that does not assign characters to specific estates so much as allow the reader to doso, in a society where the obligations ofestates were being turned upside down. Going well beyondJill Mann's work on estate satire, Olson argues convincingly that Chaucer departs from the old three-order picture of clergy...