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REVIEWS textual analysis. Ralph Hanna's accounts of the history of the Ellesmere manuscript and the production and inadequacies of the 1911 facsimile are excellent. His paleographical commentary calls attention to problems that require fuller consideration of a sort that must wait upon the production of an uncleaned, page-numbered, full-color facsimile. I thank Laura Howes for double-checking my citations. JOHN H. FISHER University of Tennessee, Knoxville (Emeritus) DONALD R. HOWARD. Chaucer: HisLzfe, His Works, His World. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1987. Pp. xx, 636. $29.95. Published simultaneously in the United Kingdom under the title Chaucer and the Medieval World (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1987). It is impossible to read this book without being reminded of the sad circumstances of the author's death as it was being brought to publication. Howard was such a personal writer, lived in such an urgent, precarious, and vulnerable relationship with his subject, that these reminders are bound to be particularlypowerful.Intimacies that in his previous writing might have been embarrassing at best ("As I write this, I can see the city of San Francisco spread before me, gemlike beside its bay," p. 210) acquire a peculiar poignancy. But the author would not have wished such reflections, nor the restraints of De mortuis . .. , to sway the critic from an objective view of his performance in this life of Chaucer. It is indeed a book with many defects. What Howard has done is an old-fashioned version ofthe classic type of the critical biography, in which the chronology of events of the author's life, a critical account of his writings, and an attempt to place both life and writings in the context of the age are combined. He is right to talk about the urge everyone has to write a life of Chaucer: he is, of all our poets, the one who feels closest and who, as a man, most demands our interest and affection. Yet he is also the most elusive. His writings give only a series of baffling clues to what kind of man he was, and the 493 documentary records of his life, collected in the invaluable Chaucer Life-Records of 199 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER Martin M. Crow and Clair C. Olson, give even less-create, indeed, an almost impenetrable shell around the "real" Geoffrey Chaucer. The other thing that makes a biography ofChaucer irresistible, both for the writer and for the reader, is the extraordinarily close engagement ofhis life, even in theunfleshedform it takes in the records, with the great events and personages ofhis day.He lived and worked in London; was a courtier, soldier, and civil servant; travelled in France, Spain, and Italy; served various of the great men of the time; was in Parliament and in and out of favor; and lived to a good age. As Howard says, if "Chaucer had not written a line of verse, he would be a very apt subject for a biography, and his biography would be a very apt introduction to the life and history of his times" (p.335). As for the biographer, his role is simple: he must write as if he knows everything, while he knows that he knows nothing.Once the knowledge of his ignorance ceases to be the ever-present informing agent of his writing, the way is open to loose and sloppy imaginings.There will be, as in this biographyofChaucer, a great quantity ofspeculationand much making of connections between Chaucer's life, works, and world that have no more than creative whimsicality to recommend them. The disorder in schools after the plague, the lack of teaching supervision, is what formed in Chaucer the habit of "not knowing with security" (p. 25). His education in law, and the discussion of fictitious cases, may have given him his taste for ambiguity (p. 78). His "androgynous personality" is what enabled him to see the world from the point of view of women (p. 97).The discussion of marriage in The Canterbury Tales was prompted by his wife's death (p. 429). There is a characteristic kind of bravado in the way Howard is prepared to ask unanswerable questions-was Chaucer's...

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