Through Nature to Eternity: Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women by Donald W. Rowe (review)

REVIEWS sermons. He rejects the suggestion that "Herebert intended these pieces for singing" (p. 21). While I fully agree with his view, I would add that the poems call for another and closer look focusing on the revisions that Herebert undertook, many of which point to a metrical consciousness on his part that overrides strict word-by-word translation. Reimer has given us a good deal of material for such study, and it is a pity that his edition does not include a fuller synthesis of this matter than his brief remarks in the introduction. Further analysis of Herebert's metrical concerns will have to turn to the manuscript once more since, as I have suggested, some expunc­ tions for apparently metrical reasons and, in addition, Herebert's half-line slashes are not recorded here. It would also be desirable to compare Herebert's work with that of other preachers and Franciscan friars, such as John of Grimestone, who similarly Englished Latin and French material and used it in their sermons. SIEGFRIED WENZEL University of Pennsylvania DONALD W ROWE. Through Nature to Eternity: Chaucer'sLegend of Good Women. Lincoln andLondon: University ofNebraska Press, 1988. Pp. X, 218. $22.95. Critical discussion ofthis poem frequently opens with a remark to the effect that it is a transitional and perplexing work. Rowe's book eschews such apologetic defense in favor of confident apologetic: he proposes that the thinness ofcritical response to the work is likely to have resulted less from its artistic thinness than from our failure to perceive its intended complexities. The first chapter, "Backgrounds," attempts to locate the present book within modern critical discussion of the poem and to locate the poem within literary relations of its own time. This dual aim makes for somewhat opaque argument. Which version of the Prologue was written first Rowe treats as a question not settled-a matter he develops further in a final excursus-but having taken this stand goes on to say that "the absence of objective criteriafor establishing priority does not free us topleaseourselves in selecting a text" (p. 3). By "selecting a text" he appears to mean that a critic who wishes to discuss the Prologue together with the legends must decide which version to base the discussion on. He chooses F on thematic 283 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER considerations which become clear in the following chapters but bolsters the choice by a spurious textual argument whose combination oflegitimate and illegitimate inference is tantalizing: that there isnothing in the textual history ofthe two Prologues as we know it to establish Gas a repudiation of F is a point well made; that the predominance ofF in the manuscripts therefore makes it "the necessary choice for a critical base text" (p. 3) is a non sequitur. Chapter 2, which includes some good analysis ofthe multiple perspec­ tive contained in the verbal detail ofthe Prologue, argues that the identifi­ cation of the daisy and Alceste is an image of universal natural order showing that nature and poetry can be analogous manifestations oftruth (the reference to the daisy as "the eye ofday," unique to the F Prologue, figures prominently here). Lisa Kiser's Telling Classical Tales advanced a similar argument, but Rowe departs from her position in viewing the encounter between the dreamer and Alceste as instancing the problematic character ofhuman understanding. He further diverges from Kiser, and from other studies ofthe poem which have seen the incongruities ofthe legends as a consequence ofthe imposed demands ofthe Prologue, in that he does not take the tales as illustrating the impossibility ofthe prescrip­ tion, nor does he regard the work as primarily a poem about books. Chapter 3, "The Narrator asTranslator," is full ofgood comments. It has thevirtueofsinglingout thedifferences oftoneandemphasisin each ofthe legends, as well as showing how the narrative method calls attention to omitted or abbreviated material. It is a corrective, still much needed, to nearly a century's worth ofpublished criticism which, until quite recently, hasbeen written as ifby readers seduced by thenarrator's own protestations ofdisaffection into denying the text proper attention. The premise ofthis chapter, a premise whose full implications do not become clear until later in the book...