Crux and Controversy in Middle English Textual Criticism ed. by A. J. Minnis, Charlotte Brewer (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER pleasant and instructive to have one's vague convictions confirmed by a host of shrewd observations. In fragment VII, Mandel recognizes the "lack of finish, lack of polish and lack of tidiness" (p. 157), yet he is at pains to demonstrate the same principle of thematic and structural unity that he has found in the rest of The Canterbury Tales. The tales follow a "chiasmic" as well as sequential order, and there is a great deal of recapitulation and variation of themes, not only from this fragment but from the whole ofthe collection. In a way, these six stories map out, though sketchily, the entire journey of the pilgrims. Mandel wisely refrains from pressing every detail into the service ofthis argument, since it seems obvious that this fragment, even more than most of the others, bears the marks of its unfinished state. It is Mandel's firm conviction that variety, often invoked as the only ordering principle of The Canterbury Tales, is not enough and that "Chaucer's imagination worked in such a way that he consistently and very carefully joined together those tales that, regardless of their differences, were alike because they shared the same themes, characters, and order of narrative events" (p. 184). To have joined tales from different fragments would have resulted in "structural chaos." Without going so far, I would agree with Mandel that the fragments are the largest structural units within The Canterbury Tales that we can still recover and that Chaucer linked the Tales with a shrewd eye for structural connections, not just on the principle of unplanned variety. Mandel refuses to speculate about the ultimate design of the whole collection because, even at an optimistic guess, not much more than a third of the whole edifice was completed. This shows a sensible modesty which also informs the whole book. It establishes with unassuming authority that, though the final plan is past recovery, The Canterbury Tales as we have them is more than an orderless heap of stories and that at least some of them are linked in a way that creates highly original narrative structures, unprecedented in the history of the framed tale collection. DIETER MEHL University of Bonn A. J. MINNIS and CHARLOTTE BREWER, eds. Crux and Controversy in Middle English Textual Criticism. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1992. Pp. xiv, 135. $59.00. This is a challenging collection of essays that will repay the effort and attention it requires. The contributions are directed in the first instance to 226 REVIEWS textual critics and editors, but they will prove far from uninteresting to those who are engaged in interpretation ofMiddle English literature and in the use ofthis literature for other sorts ofinvestigation. In fact, this second group might be the real beneficiaries of this collection. A number of the essays address directly the textual situation of works central to the Middle English canon, those ofChaucer and Langland. Both Norman Blake and Derek Pearsall focus on the demonstrable "instability" ofthe Middle English texts, particularly Chaucer's, and on the unwilling­ ness ofpast editors to reveal this instability to their readers. Blake argues that standardized editions of Chaucer suppress the evidence of authorial revision that the manuscripts provide. Pearsall begins with the question of authorial revision but broadens his focus to the editorial (and critical) need for "a single master-text" despite the evidence against the recoverability of such a text for Middle English works. While Blake and Pearsall raise se­ rious questions about the reliability of our standard editions of Chaucer, Charlotte Brewer, in her contribution, chisels away, lemma by lemma, at the fearful symmetry ofGeorge Kane's Piers Plowman. One might conclude from this group ofpapers that editions ofChaucer give us the illusion that there is but one text of The Canterbury Tales or Troilus while editions of Piers give us the illusion that there are but three. It must be noted in passing how impressively (one is tempted to say "ominously") the presence ofGeorge Kane weighs on this volume; Brewer's is the only essay directly concerned with Piers, but Kane is significantly mentioned in every essay but one, being referred to in the introductoty footnotes...