Chaucerian Belief: The Poetics of Reverence and Delight by John M. Hill (review)

REVIEWS common view, explicitly asserted, for example, by Spinoza and Leibniz, that only relata exist extra-mentally-that relations themselves are merely ways of thinking about the relata. If this seems implausible, imagine thinking of relations as expressing comparisons. Even if the things we compare and the basis in things for the comparisons exist extra-mentally, the comparisons themselves do not exist extra-mentally: a universe without minds would contain no comparisons. If Henninger is right, with Peter Aureoli (ca. 1280-1322) we arrive at a scholastic thinker verging on the seventeenth-century conception. As Henninger quotes Peter, "A great nothing it is to do what has already been done [factumfocere est magnum nihil]" (p. 130). I cannot, in a brief review, indicate all the topics (e.g., accounts of the Trinity) Relations touches upon. His book is devoted to explaining how the accounts of relations differ in St. Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, Richard of Mediavilla, John Duns Scorns, Henry of Harday, William of Ockham, and Peter Aureoli, and how these thinkers' broader metaphysical inclinations shape their accounts of relations. This has not been done before in such depth and breadth. SHELDON M. COHEN University of Tennessee JOHN M. HILL. Chaucerian Belief The Poetics ofReverence and Delight. New Haven, Conn., and London: Yale University Press, 1991. Pp. xi, 204. $27.50. The title and subtitle of this book might seem to promise a resounding affirmation of ultimate verities in Chaucer's poetry, but what the book delivers is something more mild, more banal, finally less interesting than that prospect. The "reverence" envisaged by Hill, forinstance, ismerely the attitude ofrespect toward stories, or readiness to give them credence, that he thinks Chaucer wishes to inculcate in readers. Stories deserve credence because Chaucer is convinced that "fiction has truths to tell" (p. 153). Admittedly these truths in story are likely to be mixed with falsehoods or to be partial, but that does not reduce Chaucer to "a general relativism"; rather it gives him the opportunity to sort discrete claims in quest of a 153 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER "norm to which those claims point or an equilibrium between them that in tum approximates that norm" (p. 7). The process of perceiving truth in story is partly cognitive, for, says Hill (sounding a bit like a nebulous eighteenth-century essayist), Chaucer's basis is that truth "coheres with the mind and with our sense of what is reasonable, provided our minds are generous, capable of reverence and delight" (p. 75). Yet truth will befelt as much as perceived because stories move their readers. And since this process of affective response is crucial to Hill's thesis, the response of the Canterbury tellers to the tales they are telling preoccupies him especially. Their responses, satisfactory or un­ satisfactory, are signaled by their personal intrusions into the narratives. Unsatisfactory responses are those that aim to exert mastery of some kind over the tale, to dominate it for personal ends, and it is in the demonstra­ tion of this that the difficulty of "crediting" fiction satisfactorily is eluci­ dated for the reader. (The verb credit arises from LGWP credence and becomes one of Hill's favorite locutions. It denotes "that openness of belief, feeling, delight, and mentalaccordwith which we should approach... any tale" [p. 55].) In the current climate of opinion in Chaucer studies it takes nerve to concentrate once again, albeit guardedly, on the pilgrim tellers as indi­ vidual voices, though Hill might be able to guarantee a hearing among the thousands of Chaucer students who every year find this a natural way into The Canterbury Tales, despite the regiments of critics attempting to block that route. However, the notion of the tales as pilgrim monologues is here retrieved only in an awkward, attenuated form. The tellers are apparently not responsible for the primary "fabric" or "paraphrasable story line" (p. 156) of their tales, only for moments of personal commentary. Thus "there is a tale Chaucer constructs to which the Nun's Priest reacts in the telling of it, the whole becoming the Nun's Priest's Tale" (p. 139). Hill applies this reaction theory rigidly in the book, using the criterion...