Chaucer’s Measuring Eye by Linda Tarte Holley (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER through her text and, perhaps, only as a text. In his analysis Hirsh fails to acknowledge the essentially narrative self that is Margery Kempe and thereby allows himselfto create a figure who, not surprisingly, confirms his own argument about the paramystical. For scholars studying religious visions as universal, transhistorical experiences, this book will contribute good discussions ofseveral Middle English mystical and devotional works. But for scholars engaged in the study ofMargery Kempe's Book for what it may reveal about gender, culture, economic standing, and religious senti­ ment in a particular historical era and place, this book, unfortunately, will disappoint. LAURA L. HOWES University of Tennessee LINDA TARTE HOLLEY. Chaucer's Measun·ng Eye. Houston, Tex.: Rice Uni­ versity Press, 1990. Pp. 189. $24.95. On the face ofit, Holley's project is fascinating. She attempts to bring the thirteenth-century perspectivists-Roger Bacon, Robert Grosseteste, John Pecham (the Oxford perspectivists), and Witelo-to bear on Chaucer. According to Holley, their "rationalization of seeing, ...demonstrated scientifically" (p. 13), influenced Renaissance art (beginning with Giottowhose work, according to Holley, Chaucer saw) and, in the case of Grosseteste, the "ideasWycliffe popularized for his owndoctrinalends" (p. 13).Theseare the linesofconnection, for Holley, betweenChaucerand the perspectivists, not drawn with great precision in chapter 1, though meant to indicatedirectlines ofinfluence. Holley's claim is that "Chaucer's visual aptitude is directly related to his geometric sensibility, a sensibility sharp­ ened by seeing perspective drawings and knowing the optical scientists' mathematical theory" (p. 40). Unfortunately, as a historical argument, Holley's claim is shaky. Her evidence for Chaucer's seeing Giotto (or works of "native English painters who used new artistic techniques ofperspective in Westminster Palace and Abbey by the second halfofthe fourteenth century") is simply speculative (see pp. 37, 160-61 n.44). And Holley cites no passages in Chaucer that directly echo the perspectivists. The broad references in Troilus and Cnseyde to Boethius's optical theories (see pp.73-74), ifthat is what they 158 REVIEWS are, only show how ubiquitous were theories of "measuring" throughout the Middle Ages and how purely intellectual (unpictorial) they might be. As a theoretical-critical observation about Chaucer's poetry, Holley's claim is fraught with conceptual imprecision.Perhaps most egregiousfor her own position is that Holley confuses the idea of the pictorial (or scenic) in Chaucer-she insists that Chaucer is a pictorial artist- with the idea that each of Chaucer's narratives has a visualizable structure, a geometric shape we can see. Holley gives surprisingly few examples of the pictorial in Chaucer, who is not, I still think, a visual poet, perspectivist or otherwise. Even V A.Kolve does not claim that Chaucer is a perspectivist, and there is, I think (despite Holley's objections), some truth to H. A. Kelly's argument that Chaucer's narrative comes from reading and imagination instead of pictures. Kelly says that Chaucer does not think through the visual and spatial implications of his scenes, and with that even Kolve might agree. In chapter 2, Holley gives us two instances of "paratactic" scenes in Chaucer, one in The SecondNun's Tale and one in The Man ofLaw's Tale. Her analysis of the scene in The Man ofLaw's Tale where Constance gazes at the Virgin (pp.57-59) is sensitive indeed.But what Holley is describing here, and describing well, is the moral structure of the religious tale, a structure we do nothave to behold in any literal sense to appreciate.Holley also gives us in chapter 2 one instance of a "periodic" scene, the scene in fragment VI of The Canterbury Tales of the Physician, the Host, and the Pardoner on the Canterbury road.But if Chaucer is a perspectivist in any literal sense here, even an imperfect (or budding) one, he surely would have initially worked out where everyone is in this "scene," which includes a rather discontinuous description of events. Is everyone on horseback? Walking together within earshot? Who else among the Canterbury pil­ grims is listening to the Physician and the Pardoner? This is the problem of roadside drama, now raised as the first concern of a so-called...