Chaucer in Context: Society, Allegory and Gender by S. H. Rigby (review)

REVIEWS Woman, Woman as an ancient topic for discussion, and is not primarily concerned with the problems that real women faced" (p. 328). Does the humorous nature of a written work, however, permit us to sever the textual from the social? As scholarship as early as Henri Bergson's Le Rire contends, laughter is a social practice. Moreover, as work on humor and the sex/gender system by Nancy A. Walker, Regina Barreca, Maha­ dev L. Apte, and others demonstrates, laughter as a social practice in the West traditionally has had unfortunate consequences for actual women. A deeper engagement with the politics of Chaucer's joke at Woman's expense would have enriched Percival's study. But despite this limita­ tion, Chaucer's Legendary Good Women, with both its fine synthesis ofcriti­ cal work on the Legend and its comprehensive account ofthe sources and analogues of the poem, is a commendable achievement. KATHY LAVEZZO University of Iowa S. H. RIGBY. Chaucer in Context: Society, Allegory and Gender. Manchester Medieval Studies. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996. Pp. xii, 205. $59.95 cloth, $24.95 paper. Much of the study of Chaucer in the last decade has been shaped by a historical criticism heavily influenced by a sense of growing proximity between the disciplinary projects of historians and literary critics. For many in literature this proximity has been enabled by a certain ex­ change-by the supersession of notions of the distinctiveness of "poetic language" in favor of the "text," an object including both the literary sphere and documentary culture in the same interpretive framework. Similarly, for many historians the positivistic faith in the unique testi­ monial value ofthe document has given way to a sense ofthe importance of structural and narrative models in making proper sense of documen­ tary evidence. The promise ofthe current rapprochement between liter­ ature and history thus lies not in some new negotiation of the relation between these fields, but rather in the fact that we share, perhaps more than ever before, a similar set ofanalytical objects and interpretive tools. Stephen Rigby's Chaucer in Context is a significant new entry to this interdisciplinary conversation. Rigby's previous work, such as his En527 STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER glish Society in the Later Middle Ages: Class, Status and Gender (New York: St.Martin's Press, 1995), has been notably adventurous in its combina­ tion of scrupulous historical research and bold structural interpretation. In much of its argument, Chaucer in Context shows a similar intellectual flair, not only in its ambition to speak of Chaucer as a historian but also in its careful synthesis of social and intellectual history with a thorough sense of the current stakes in Chaucer studies and in relevant literary theory. The book is organized into four chapters, with a concluding epilogue. Rigby's method is dialectical, presenting in each chapter two diametri­ cally opposed interpretive stances and then adjudicating between them. First, in "Chaucer: Real-Life Observation versus Literary Convention," he weighs the balance between realism and literary convention in The Canterbury Tales, offering the conclusion that "the pilgrims and the char­ acters within their tales are best seen as active reinterpretations of reality in terms of the literary conventions, scientific doctrines and stock social satires of the day" (p.15).In his second chapter, "Monologic versus Dia­ logic Chaucer," Rigby turns to Bakhtin's distinction between monologic and dialogic texts, using these categories as a way of separating out what are, for him, the two underlying versions of Chaucer in twentieth­ century criticism: on the one hand a monologic, or essentially "conserva­ tive," Chaucer; and on the other a "heterodox" Chaucer whose works offer a "challenge to the official world-view of his age" (p. 18).Rigby argues here that the apparentcontradictionbetween dialogic and mono­ logic readings of Chaucer's work is a function of a misperception, that although "Chaucer himself intended his work to buttress the hierar­ chial, official world-view of his day, such intentions could come into conflict with the dialogic potential inherent in his story-telling contest and with his adoption of a literary form ...ill equipped to constrain later interpretations" (p.72).His third chapter, "Allegorical...