Chaucer and the Law by Joseph Allen Hornsby (review)

REVIEWS books are conspicuous among the Digby manuscripts containing Middle English prose. No work of the kind undertaken insuch a handlist is likelyto be entirely without flaws. Indexing is a thankless but necessary task, and students of Middle English prose owe much gratitude to Horner, as well as to the other contributors to this project. H. L. SPENCER Corpus Christi College, Oxford JOSEPH ALLEN HORNSBY. Chaucer and the Law. Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1988. Pp. ix, 180. $32.95. Joseph Allen Hornsby's Chaucerandthe Law is the first book-length study of the relationship between the nature of medieval English law and Chau­ cer's literary works. That field has been relatively unploughed to date but is highly promising for future yield. The present volume makes a good start, bringing before a wider audience a fair number of medieval legal concerns that heretofore have lain hidden in volumes not often consulted by literary critics. The structure of the book is clear and helpful; the writing is straightforward; and the historical information is well researched. The main weaknesses of the book lie in what it does and does not do with the legal information it presents. The strongest point of the volume is the quality of its historical informa­ tion. The bibliography will be helpful to anyone who wishes to venture into this cross-disciplinary field. The brief introductions to basic legal concepts are achieved with clarity, accuracy, and dispatch. The footnotes are contin­ ually interesting and on occasion more critically engaged than the text itself. As an introduction to the legal knowledge necessary to understand Chaucer more fully, the book can make a substantial contribution. The problems arise when Professor Hornsby attempts to put this histor­ ical knowledge to work. He spends the first fifth of thevolume debating the assumption that Chaucer was legally trained. He reviews the evidence and the established theories, only to conclude that (1) Chaucer.knew a good dealabout thelaw, but that (2) Chaucer neednot havestudiedlaw formally because he could have learned it all informally. His conclusion strikes me as essentially unhelpful, something like the discovery that the plays of William Shakespeare were not written by William Shakespeare, but rather by another man of the same name. The problem is not so much that 241 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Hornsby's arguments seem unconvincing (although some ofthem do: Is it likely that Chaucer wouldhavelearnedhis law "on the job," so to speak, on his ambassadorial missions to France and Italy? Does the possibility of learning law informally indicate the probability that Chaucer did so?) Rather the problem is that playing pick-lock biographer here yields no apparent gain. Professor Hornsby fails to indicate exactly why the locus of Chaucer's legal education should be significant for our consideration ofthe effect of that education on his poetry. The same kind of problem recurs when Hornsby argues about the function of the Inns of Court during Chaucer's life. The fact is, quite simply, that we lack the necessary information. We do not know when the Inns ofCourt ceased being mere inns and began to assume the character of law schools; nor need it matter for us, as far as our engagement with Chaucer's work is concerned. Fourteenth century English lawyers were formally trained somewhere, somehow, whether it was at the Inns of Court or not. Chaucer was trained either formally or informally, as we can tell from his multifarious legal references and uses of legal theory throughout his work. The count ofyeas versus nays concerning historical theories ofhis biography can be of no import for us in our present state of factlessness. Best to leave the curious question behind and concentrate on what we have-Chaucer's texts. That is what Professor Hornsby attempts to do after his first chapter. The results are mixed. He investigates two main questions throughout (al­ though he never quite articulates themas such): (1) Did Chaucer's knowing something about law make a difference in his writing?; and (2) Would our knowing moreabout medieval English law makea difference in ourreading his writing? It is in responding to these questions that for me the book fails to make an interesting contribution...