Classical Imitation and Interpretation in Chaucer’s Troilus by John V. Fleming (review)

REVIEWS clearly founded on postmodern concepts about language and narrative, her focus is linguistic, and her statements of critical theory are few and basic. MELISSA PUTMAN SPRENKLE University of Tennessee JOHN V. FLEMING. Classical Imitation and Interpretation in Chaucer's Troilus. Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1990. Pp. xviii, 276. $35.00. John V. Fleming's Classical Imitation and Interpretation in Chaucer's Troilus does not propose a "comprehensive new interpretation" of the poem. Rather it provides a new point of departure for the Robertsonian reading of the poem as Christian tragedy by deriving the poem's literary practice and ethical emphasis not from patristics but from classical tradi­ tion. It is Fleming's main contention that Troi!us is a classical imitation, a roman d'antiquite modeled on classical epic and written according to that tradition's own practice of poetic imitation. This practice involves openly imitating and adapting one's predecessors in a spirit of emulation. Preced­ ing Chaucer in fashioning imitations of classical epic, bothJean de Meun and Dante mediate theclassical practice of literary imitation and model the Christian adaptation of the classical epic's own moral critique of erotic passion and divination. Arguing his case with characteristic zest, Fleming undertakes to turn the tables rhetorically on those who have accused Robertsonianism of a narrow positivism and a reductive historicism that subordinate great poets to mediocre clerics. The immediate purpose of the first chapter is to defend the alleged pun in the line "O thow lanterne of which queynt is the lyght" from Troilus's apostrophe to Criseyde's empty house (TC 5.543). Given Benson's recent denial that the word queynte ever meant "female genitals," this argument necessarily requires two propositions: that such is the word's meaning and that the context of its use licenses recognizing the pun. Fleming has no new philological evidence to offer. Rather, criticizing Benson's "positivist as­ sumptions," he argues that what matters is not what queynte meant in Middle English generally but what it meant in Chaucer's literary idiolect and that his use of it in The Miller's Tale and The Wife a/Bath's Prologue to 129 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER refer to the female genitals gives it that meaning in his idiolect. This is less than fully persuasive,at the very leastfor the positivist reason thatthese two texts postdate Trozlus. In any case, the possibility of the pun, not its actuality, is what really matters to Fleming, for whether or not the poem's decorum permits punning on such a "cherles" term depends on the kind of poem Troilus is. Fleming argues that the context of Troilus's apostrophe is characterized by a pervasive imitation of Ovid's Ars and Remedia, both directly and through the mediation of the Roman de la Rose, and that it participatesfully in Ovid'sandJean's satiric tenor. In such a context the pun would hardly be out of order. Fleming's second chapter continues his examination of ambiguity by tracing the literary history behind Chaucer's use of the term "ambage" in reference to the notorious ambiguity of oracles. He finds the antecedents for Chaucer's condemnation of the "corsed olde rytes" of the pagans in the moral disapprobation of relying on oracles evident in Lucan's and Statius's epic imitations of Aeneas's visit to the Cumaean Sibyl. This time the influential Christian mediator is the Commedia rather than the Roman. There Dante imitates this same Virgilian episode to expose the false prophecies of the lying pagan gods and, in Fleming's reading, identifies the pagan belief that Venus causes love ("folle amore") as a comparable lie. Given that the only oracular moments in Trozlus, Calchas's prophecy and Cassandra's dream interpretation, prove unambiguously true, presumably Fleming finds the poem's general indictment of the pagan gods principally in what he takes to be Chaucer's unequivocal condemnation of Venus. In Fleming's reading, Chaucer'sinvocation to Venus dramatizes "in the pagan voice of the narrator Lollius" the transparently false double pretense that Venus is the source of a love that is benign. For Fleming, as for Augustine, an ambiguity has...