Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems by A.J. Minnis, V.J. Scattergood and J. J. Smith (review)

REVIEWS A.J. MINNIS with V.J. SCATTERGOOD and J. J. SMITH. Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. xiv, 578. $72.00. Compared to its predecessors (Helen Cooper, The Canterbury Tales (1989}; Barry Windeatt, Troilus andCriseyde (1992}), this third and last volume of the Oxford Guides to Chaucer (OGC) is heftier (578 pages, vs. 437 for the Tales and 414 for the Troilus), and, more significantly, it brings the series very much into the 1990s in critical style as well as date. A. J. Minnis's discussions of The Book ofthe Duchess (BD), The House ofFame(HF), The Parliament ofFowls (PF), and The LegendofGood Women (LGW) adopt a personal, often tendentious voice and undertake to en­ gage aggressively many of the critical issues and perspectives that have entered, and to a great extent transformed, Chaucer criticism during the last 20 years. (By contrast, the appended survey of the lyrics by V. J. Scattergood does not overtly manifest Minnis's concern "to consider the ideological implications of various readings" of Chaucer's poetry [p. 1}.) Responding positively (if not without some ambivalence) to the evo­ lution of the "New Historicism," Minnis offers his "readings of Chaucer's love-visions within an anthropology of courtly didacticism and play and as inscriptions of aristocratic ideals of conduct and processes of cultural fashioning" (p. 4), while resisting the notion that Chaucer is to be understood exclusively "as occupying the position of sophisticated princepleaser"-an understanding that runs counter to Minnis's "identifications of certain prospects of dissidence in Chaucerian fiction," specifically with respect to "aristocratic mores, tra­ ditional misogyny, [or} authoritarian literary theory" (p. 5). Overall, Minnis rejects attempts to read the dream-poems in ways that he regards as anachronistic or overly generalized. He has no pa­ tience with the Robertsonian, allegorizing school (Chaucer, to him, is clearly a secular poet who avoids opportunities to allegorize, as when he borrows details for his version of the Ceyx and Alcyone story in BD from the Ovide moralise, but avoids its moralitas). And in at least partial op­ position to feminist critiques of the representation of women in the dream poems, he aims at "a historicized gender criticism which at­ tempts to respect the room for dissent which the culture of Chaucer's day allowed, in so far as that can be recuperated by recourse to such ev­ idence as is available to us" (p. 5). (To this end, Minnis distinguishes between the "structural antifeminism" of late medieval European civi­ lization, by which Chaucer could not avoid being somewhat affected, 275 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER and "phobic antifeminism," that special animosity most characteristic of clerics, from which he largely absolves the poet [see pp.427-32}.) Two introductory chapters locate the dream-poems with respect to vernacular literary traditions and the social ideologies of Chaucer's au­ dience."The Shorter Poems: Social and Cultural Contexts" offers an ex­ cellent summary of recent theorizing about Chaucer's social and profes­ sional placement and its impact on his poetic development. Minnis argues for the crucial influence of the "international [i. e. , French-based} court culture," promoted by Edward III and Richard II, both on Chaucer's poetic formation and on the "receptive company of courtiers who shared an interest in poetry and a highly personal and earnest piety" (p.19)-the so-called "Lollard Knights" who collectively estab­ lish a "horizontal axis [on which} may be sought the audience of Chaucer's courtly poetry" (p.22 ). "Chaucer and the Love-Vision Form" first examines the ambiguous, often indeterminate dream taxonomies of Chaucer's heritage and demonstrates how his dream-poems reproduce and exploit the ambigu­ ities of significance and interpretation associated with dreams.In the second part of this chapter, dedicated to the analogously complex issue of fin' amors, Minnis considers "the implications of the conventions of courtly love for the construction of gender" (p.60).Responding to the spate of recent analyses-singled out are those of R. Howard Bloch, Maud Ellmann, and Elaine Tuttle Hansen-that depict courtly love as a "patriarchal conspiracy" (p.67), Minnis argues that such judgments, while obviously valid in part, ultimately constitute...