The Making of Chaucer’s English: A Study of Words by Christopher Cannon (review)

REVIEWS such as her claim that the Wife of Bath grows into "an independent self" (p. 213) almost beyond Chaucer's control. Chapter 10 on love, marriage, and sexuality displays a somewhat complacent assumption that contem­ porary values are normative, with its talk of "personal growth" (p. 240). To conclude that poets like Chaucer played an "increasingly insistent role in the cultural dialogue that ultimately yielded a much more af­ firmative view of love and marriage's role in securing human happiness" seems overly optimistic in the face of that reality that marriage in The Canterbury Tales is almost always nasty, brutal, or short. The conclusion, "A Zone of Freedom: Carnival as the Emblem of an Age," also perhaps too easily assumes that Chaucer endorses the Miller's physicality and the Wife of Bath's sexuality. Chaucer and the Late Medieval World may sometimes rely too much on our modern world and assumptions, but its emphasis on everyday and even transgressive contexts makes it a worthy successor (and corrective) to Robertson's more pious Chaucer's London. Bisson's book is not a serious study of Chaucer's poetry, but it is a clearly written, heavily researched introductory guide for those who want to know what is now being writ­ ten about Chaucer and his times. Although addressed to new and begin­ ning readers, experienced Chaucerians may also benefit from it. C. DAVID BENSON University of Connecticut CHRISTOPHER CANNON. The Making of Chaucer's English: A Study of Words. Cambridge Studies in Medieval Literature, vol. 39. Gen. ed. Alastair Minnis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Pp. xiii, 435. $69.95. This book comes in two distinct halves, introducing its argument in part 1 ("The Study of Words") and the lexical evidence for it in part 2 ("Words Studies"). Part 2 is "an index of all of Chaucer's vocabulary that can be historicized (that is, generally, excluding proper nouns) according to the system of Larry Benson's Glossarial Concordance to the Riverside Chaucer" (p. 5). It gives, for each headword, the number of "the particu­ lar subheading in the MED where the first recorded use of the headword appears" (p. 228); the etymology; the date and text in which the head465 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER word first appears in the written record; the text in which it first occurs in Chaucer; and the number of times the word is used by Chaucer "in the texts concorded in Volume I of Benson's Glossarial Index" (p. 234). It is an index, not a glossary or a concordance: neither meanings nor variant spellings are given, since what matters for the purposes of this book is only that a word is used, not what it means or how it is spelled (thus the only form found for the thousand-odd occurrences of the pos­ sessive plural ofthe personal pronoun is that ofthe headword, here). This is an economical system, allowing much information to be packed·into a small space. To rake a straightforward example: the entry "mortifica­ tion n. b ML & OF Chaucer PARS T l" tells us that Chaucer is the first­ recorded user in English of the noun mortification; that he uses it once only, in The Parson's Tale; and that the sense in which he uses it is MED's sense b (correctly lb, but spot checks did not reveal any other such errors). Part 1 questions the standard view of Chaucer's crucial place in the development of English-the view that sees him both as the great im­ prover and refiner of the language ("the father of English") and as the model for future writers ("the father of English poetry"). It demon­ strates, on the contrary, that Chaucer's linguistic practices, far from be­ ing novel (as generally assumed), were entirely traditional. He is usually credited with having been not only a great borrower of words from French and Latin with which to enrich the language but also the first great borrower. Cannon, however, shows otherwise: that borrowing was standard practice throughout the Middle English period (especially in the century and a halfbefore Chaucer, from 1200 to 1350); that Chaucer's own new borrowings are outnumbered...