Chaucer and His English Contemporaries: Prologue and Tale in the Canterbury Tales by W. A. Davenport (review)

STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER non shows here how the editors' a priori opinion of Chaucer as one of the founding fathers of modem English predisposed them to choose quotations from his works even when earlier ones were available (pp. 2 01-6); thus Chaucer frequently appears in the OED as the earliest­ recorded user of a given word even when he was not; thus his patriarchal position is (falsely) confirmed. This last point is nicely made, but other parts of the argument are more doubtful.Why did Hoccleve, Lydgate, and others name Chaucer as their master rather than Virgil or Ovid (pp.185- 8 7), unless it was because they had been influenced by Chaucer? Their repetition of Chau­ cer's aureate words (such as enluminen) in their tributes to him (pp.21317 ) seems to me positive evidence of his influence on their language (and hence on the future of English), not of some (false) myth about it.Der­ rida may claim that "the idea of writing ...is meaningful for us only in terms of an origin" (p.18 0), but who says that all that Derrida writes is true? The book strikes me finally as perverse (in spite of the excellence of the opening chapters and the exhaustive research that has gone into the compiling of part 2).If what you really want to write is "a general history of ...the 'rise of English as a literary language,"' paying due attention to the importance of "the early Middle English writing that preceded Chaucer" (pp. 218-19)-a very valuable project, surely?­ isn't it self-defeating to write instead (merely because it will sell better) a book on the unimportance of Chaucer to the history of the language? Let's hope that, having done the second of these things (against both his inclination and his better judgment, it seems), Cannon will now go back to do the first. T.L.BURTON University of Adelaide W. A.DAVENPORT.Chaucer and His English Contemporaries: Prologue and Tale in the Canterbury Tales.New York: St.Martin's Press, 19 9 8. Pp.x, 245.$55.0 0 cloth, $19.95 paper. With the publication of William Davenport's latest book, Chaucer stud­ ies has achieved an appropriate symmetry in book titles containing the 468 REVIEWS words "English" and "French." Davenport's study of the domestic con­ text of The Canterbury Tales is less ambitious than James Wimsatt's re­ view of Chaucer's French lyric influences in Chaucer and His French Con­ temporaries (1991). Its intended audience is also different: Chaucer and His English Contemporaries is geared toward beginning readers of Middle English (most textual quotations have glosses) and beginning research­ ers in Chaucer studies (its engagement with other criticism is kept at an appropriately limited level). Nonetheless, it provides a nuanced analysis of the specifically English artistic environment of The Canterbury Tales, and it successfully suggests the generic complexities and innovations of Chaucer's last great work. Similar in tone and method to his earlier book on Chaucer, Chaucer: Complaint and Narrative (1988), Davenport's latest book is a readable and thoughtful study. It can be recommended as a useful resource for any course situating The Canterbury Tales with con­ temporary English literature. There are seven chapters: a brief introduction, a summarizing con­ clusion, and five middle chapters: "Prologues," "Tales," "Romances," "Chaucer, Gower, and the Gawain-Poet," and "Forms of Narrative." The subjects of the second two chapters establish the basic areas of analysis. Chapter 2 provides a good review ofthe literary notion of a prologue in Chaucer's day, and it challenges some received ideas about how Chau­ cer's own prologues work. Drawing from the rhetorical tradition of text division (from Cicero to Isidore, Geoffrey of Vinsauf, and John of Gar­ land) as well as from the analysis of Gottfried von Strassburg's Tristan, Davenport identifies the traits of "composite prologues" (p. 16) and their "overlapping strategies" (p. 18): they both introduce the work to come and insinuate the speaker into the reader's confidence. Davenport then analyzes the prologues to Gower's Confessio Amantis and Langland's Piers Plowman as unique examples of composite prologues in...