Chaucer, Lollius, and the Medieval Theory of Authorship

Chaucer, Lollius, and the Medieval Theory of Authorship Bella Millett University ofSouthampton In the smoll wodd ofEnglish stud;e, fr;, d;flicult to escape the cunent preoccupation with literary theory; even the medievalists, traditionally slower than their colleagues in responding to new developments, are beginning to show a greater concern with theoretical issues. 1 One result of this tendency has been a widespread sense ofcritical insecurity. Caught up in the struggle between conflicting theoretical approaches, literary scholars are finding themselves obliged-often reluctantly-to spend an increasing amount oftime simply defending the assumptions underlying their own critical positions. Recent research, however, has offered Chaucer critics one possible way around this problem. In the last few years there have been major advances in our knowledge oflate-medieval literary theory and in particular scholas­ tic literary theory. Since 1982, Alastair Minnis has published two impor­ tant books on the subject, Medieval Theory ofAuthorship and Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity,2 in which he emphasizes its relevance to Chaucer studies. He disapproves ofthe "fashionable" tendency to apply concepts from modern literary theory to late-medieval literature- "concepts which have no historical validity as far as medieval literature is concerned"-and sees this as a "tacit admission ofdefeat" by scholars unable to find satisfac­ tory critical tools in the medieval sources they have consulted so far, the arts of preaching and poetry. As an alternative he offers the "substantial corpus" ofliterary theory to be found in late-medieval scholastic commen­ taries. This body of theory, he argues, offers the critic of late-medieval 1 See, for instance, the articles on medieval literature and contemporary theory in NLH10 (1979); and in Donald M. Rose, ed., New Perspectives in Chaucer Criticism (Norman, Okla.: Pilgrim Books, 1981). 2 Alastair Minnis, Chaucer and Pagan Antiquity (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1982); Alastair Minnis, Medieval Theory ofAuthorship (London: Scolar Press, 1984). 93 RECONSTRUCTING CHAUCER literature "a conceptual equipment which is at once historically valid and theoretically adequate."3 In the present state of critical disarray this claim has obvious attractions. A theory of literature which was actually current in Chaucer's time has an inbuilt historical advantage over any twentieth­ century approach; it seems to offer an intellectually respectable way of bypassing altogether the ideological battlefield of modern critical theory. But how far is scholastic literary theory really "historically valid and the­ oretically adequate" for the study of Chaucer? Judson Boyce Allen, who in his Ethical Poetic of the Middle Ages explores much the same territory as Minnis, takes it as axiomatic that scholastic literary theory corresponds to the literary practice of its time and that "Chaucer's intellectual and creative modus agendi" would have been "that which his contemporaries who wrote commentaries defined as nor­ mal for literary works."4 Minnis does not take his claims so far, and in his review of Allen's book he explicitly dissociates himself from Allen's use of scholastic literary theory as a master key to medieval literature in general. His own position is that "what in the hands of medieval commentators was an interpretative programme became in the hands of certain practising poets a possible literary strategy, ...a certain well-defined procedure which medieval poets could use but did not feel obliged to use";5 and, unlike Allen, he is prepared to concede that "Chaucer often reacted against the literary theory ofhis day, or exploited it in a very unusual way."6 But in practice his concentration on the links between scholastic literary theory and Chaucer's works sometimes has the effect of flattening out the dif­ ferences between them,7 and even when he points out apparent discrepan­ cies,8 he seems reluctant to explore their full implications.His conclusions on the nature ofChaucer's debt to the scholastic tradition ofcompilation, for instance, are surprisingly tentative: "So deliberate was [Chaucer] in presenting himself as a compiler that one is led to suspect the presence of a 3 Minnis, Medieval Theory ofAuthorship, pp. 1, 144. 4 Judson Boyce Allen, The EthicalPoetic ofthe Middle Ages: A Decorum ofConvenient Distinction (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982), p. 105. 'Speculum 59 (1984):365. 6 Minnis, Medieval Theory ofAuthorship, p. 7. 7 E.g., Chaucer's...