Chaucer’s Gardens and the Language of Convention by Laura L. Howes (review)

REVIEWS tional covenantal theology, privileging baptism, the original contract, over penance. This chapter works in part against the earlier dating, shifting some ofthe focus ofcultural change back into the twelfth cen­ tury while fully documenting the endurance of older covenantal atti­ tudes in Grosseteste and Langland. And this is still not the end, amid increasing signs that ending it is not what this author most wants to do: there follows a four-page epi­ logue that introduces the scientific meaning of"truth" and Robert Boyle in the final paragraph, and after even that an appendix on the Nigerian novel, brought back in a kind of Pythonesque reprise. This is a book that stops, ifat all, under protest. It works so well because for the most part it is persuasive that its range is valid. And, with its occasional faults and frequent magnificence of example and insight, it is a book to live with rather than read and set aside: it demands rereading, and the sort ofdisagreement with it that will follow from extended meditation. When rereading, however, readers would do well to photocopy page 9 and keep it in hand as a key to the whole work. It is here that Green takes a hugely important step, conflating the thirteen MED senses of treuth into "four main areas ofmeaning" and assigning to each ofthese a different spelling ofthe word. This makes for great cogency in Green's exposition, which in any case separates the senses along the lines ofhis chronological argument, but it runs the risk of leaving an impression that we are in fact looking at four separate words. My major reservation after two readings ofthis book is that I want to go back and substitute a single uniform spelling for all four main senses: I want to feel the conflict that occurs at the lexical level itself, the extraordinary burden on one word over centuries undergoing cultural contestation and seman­ tic change. DAVID LAWTON Washington University, St. Louis LAURA L. HOWES. Chaucer's Gardens and the Language of Convention. Gainesville, Fla.: University Press of Florida, 1997. Pp. xi, 142. $39 .95. "This pleasant tale is like a little copse!" The critic is John Keats, re­ marking upon the pseudo-Chaucerian "The Floure and the Leafe." The 499 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER impulse to equate poetic texts with the groves and gardens they contain is an old and enduring one; there may or may not be an hors-texte, but there are plenty of hortus-texts. A critic treating the Chaucerian garden might be tempted to metaphorize and textualize the concrete thing be­ yond recognition, but this is a temptation thoroughly resisted by Laura L. Howes in Chaucer's Gardens and the Language ofConvention. Her topic is the literal gardens that appear in Chaucer's poetry; she discusses ten of them. I am reminded of the line from Keats not because it's the kind of thing Howes might say, but rather because it's the kind of thing I want to say about her book. This pleasant monograph is, in its own way, like a little garden. It is little, at 109 pages of text. It is also, like a good medieval garden, extraordinarily well bounded: the focus is on a selec­ tion of Chaucer's gardens, and, though the argument certainly points to large areas for further exploration, it remains (as it were) within the walls of the garden looking out. In an age of Big Books, the modesty and clarity of Howes's project make for refreshing reading. And there are other garden pleasures as well. The writing is lucid and elegant; there are interesting insights and smart formulations; there is an air of unhurried contemplation. One feels throughout the book that one is see­ ing the gardens, the "pleasaunces," in Chaucer's life-the real and tex­ tual gardens he visited as well as those he created. Six illustrations show­ ing gardens from illuminated manuscripts help make the book an appealing object. (At $39.95, it will of course be charged more fre­ quently to library cards than to Visa cards.) After a good, clear introduction, the first chapter, "Gardens Chaucer Knew," takes...