The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England by William Calin (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER (p.58).Criseyde's "betrayal" of Troilus is discussed as though she had the autonomy to live and love as she chose.The physicality of the Wife be­ comes an "expression of freedom" (p.93), an approach that overlooks the physical abuse the Wife endures; her deafness alone is a reminder of the price her body pays for its expression of freedom.Indeed, Calabrese often fails to critique the terms of gendered discourse he himself has inherited from Ovid and Chaucer, evident in assertions such as "the Wife becomes what men fear most, the fully armed, nimble Amazon, wise through expe­ rience yet still skilled at the 'olde daunce'" (p.87).More thorough engage­ ment in feminist and queer theory might have allowed Calabrese to analyze effectively the constructed nature of gender, agency, and subjectivity in Chaucer and Ovid.Calabrese even overlooks scholarship on the "medieval Ovid," such as Warren Ginsberg's "Ovid and the Problem of Gender," or John Fyler's "Love and the Declining World: Ovid, Genesis, and Chaucer" (Mediaevalia 13 (1987]), which addresses these issues.Chaucerians have yet to explore fully the status of the medieval Ovid in Chaucer's poetry. Cala­ brese's approach to Ovid outlines some important aspects of the relation­ ship between Ovidian and Chaucerian poetry, though his conclusions­ that Troilus "points his readers ...to the Trinity" or that Chaucer is finally a "Christian servant of the Word"--do not do justice to the com­ plexities of that textual relationship. MARILYNN DESMOND SUNY Binghamton WILLIAM CALIN. The French Tradition and the Literature of Medieval England. Toronto, Buffalo, and London: University of Toronto Press, 1994.Pp.xiv, 587.$29.95 paper. William Calin's The French Tradition and the Literature ofMedieval England stands alone as both a reference work to and critical account of the relation­ ship between Francophone and Anglophone literatures in the Middle Ages. In both conception and execution, the book is unique-and uniquely useful--even though it covers a scholarly field much discussed during the last hundred and fifty years.What Calin offers is not a traditional source study that catalogues and paraphrases earlier texts, with claims to the scholar's attention only because they have influenced or been incorporated 186 REVIEWS into the works therein privileged for analysis. Such source studies usually are organized in ways that distortingly inscribe the complex transtextuality of this multilingual, transnational literary environment; they either con­ struct a single language area to consider (e.g., late-medieval English po­ etry) for reasons of cultural and disciplinary politics or, prompted by post­ romantic notions of creativity, place authors at the center of what are essentially generic and thematic networks of texts. Calin's book avoids these unnecessary limitations, but not by ignoring the claims of textual specificity or authorial difference. In other words, his is not a conventional literary history of the period, biased toward the philological facticity of contextual issues (e.g., the biography of writers, problems of attribution, dates of composition, and questions of audience and transmission). Yet he has mastered a bewildering amount of scholarship devoted to such matters, many of which lie outside his official disciplinary purview as a romaniste, and frequently offers en passant worthy and trenchant opinions on them. Like traditional source historians, Calin does privilege for analysis a se­ ries of texts (designated with necessary ambiguity as "the literature of medieval England") in reference to which another series of texts (the equally ambiguous "French tradition") is both constructed and discussed. In a very rough sense, then, this book is about "the literature of medieval England" as viewed through a comparatist lens (i.e., the "English" texts discussed are those that are connected in some fashion to "French" tradi­ tion). It is not a history of French literatureper se; it is concerned only with those texts identified as "French" that bear on those designated as "En­ glish." The book is not a guide (or a complete one, at any rate) to what might be called "the literature of medieval France." And yet what I have just written is not a particularly helpful or accurate description, precisely because one premise of Calin's book...