Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer ed. by Ruth Morse, Barry Windeatt (review)

REVIEWS "seems," and "suggests" accompany most descriptions. By the end I was yearning for a simple declarative sentence. LEE PATTERSON Duke University RUTH MORSE and BARRY WINDEATI, eds. Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honour of Derek Brewer. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990. Pp. x, 279. $49.50. Chaucer Traditions is a very distinguished book, for a variety ofreasons. To begin with, it brings together seventeen essays-nearly all significant in their own right-by former students and colleagues ofDerek Brewer, plus the "list of published writings" of that illustrious man, customary to festschriften but especially useful in this instance because ofthe range and contribution ofBrewer's work over the years. That stands to qualify Chaucer Traditions among the better tributary volumes even of recent years, when an unusual number ofsenior colleagueshave been so honored in print. But what raises this collection into a near category of its own is what I shall describe as (with apologies for the inadequacies ofthe term, on all counts) the "Breweriness" of its contents-which unusual quality I hope immedi­ ately to make clear. Over the course ofa career spanning more than forty years, Derek Brewer has paid attention, always intelligently and often as a pioneer, to the significant issues ofMiddle English scholarship. To name himmerely one of ourforemostChauceriansis to invokeimmediateredefinition and revision, especially in the presence of Toshiyuki Takamiya's painstaking chapter­ length bibliography of his writings which concludes Chaucer Traditions. "Chaucerian interests" as Brewer has established them involve not only the informed reading of Chaucer's poetry but also its influence, from the fourteenth century to the present, on other poets and on society. Brewer's work in retrospect forms a kind of nexus, with Chaucer at the center, connecting romance, paleography and printing history, prosody, rezep­ tionstheorie, historical scholarship, language study, New Historicism, eth­ nography, and-with Chaucer in His Time (1963)-marshaling Chau­ cerian realia to broaden our reading of the poetry. All of this Brewer has 187 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER carried onto the page with an independent voice, the "sound," so to say, of one man's unique and unmistakable discourse over time. These qualities of Brewer's are amply represented in this book issued in his honor. Beginning with Barry Windeatt's brief but useful historical overview of Chaucer's impact on his near contemporaries ("Chaucer Tradi­ tions"), the contributors' essays follow a rough chronology of widening influence. Thus Richard Axton, in a chapter entitled "Gower-Chaucer's Heir?" considers the complex relationship emergent from the legacy of both poets, concluding that Chaucer and Gower read each other exten­ sively, deeply, at times competitively, but invariably in ways necessary for our consideration if we are to speak adequately about either. In the essay "ChaucerandLydgate" thatfollows, Derek Pearsallargues persuasivelythat Lydgate's was an "ambitiousattempt to buildan English poetictraditionby 'fortifying' preliminary structures thrown up by Chaucer" (p. 51), and he offers perhaps the closest comparison yet of Lydgate's modifications of the variety of Chaucer's lines and ideas. SimilarlyJohn Burrow, in "Hoccleve and Chaucer," illustrates that "Hoc­ cleve's debt to Chaucer, and especially to rhyme-royal Chaucer, was im­ mense" (p. 59). Indeed, by taking Hoccleve at his word, that he learned everything at Chaucer's knee, and by effectively placing him at the end of a poetic continuum of Middle English verse from the Auchinleck Manuscript through Chaucer, Burrow throws into new and mutually illuminating perspective the achievements of pupil and master. In a second, and ex­ tremely original, essay-"Chaucer and Fifteenth-Century Romance: Par­ tonope a/Blois"-Barry Windeatt seeks to widen the acknowledged circle of English poets dependent on Chaucer's model. Windeatt's close study of Partonope is subtle and sensitive and makes good his case that the poet­ translator's result is not "necessarily like Chaucer, but the underlying resemblance is there, and the difference is in deploying Chaucerian tech­ niques in very non-Chaucerian material, which only reflects the force of Chaucer'sexample" (p. 63). This essayshouldprompt fresh examination of a much-neglected poem. Douglas Gray's look at "Some Chaucerian Themes in Scottish Writers" turns the focus northerly, away from England, and opens consideration of James...