Chaucer and Fame: Reputation and Reception ed. by Isabel Davis and Catherine Nall (review)

After Piero Boitani's Chaucer and the Imaginary World of Fame (1984), Leo Braudy's The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History (1986), and, lately, Philip Hardie's Rumour and Renown: Representations of Fama in Western Literature (2012), one could have asked, "What else can be said of Chaucer and fame?" and decided that at least for some time there was hardly any need for another book on the subject. The present volume's subtitle, Reputation and Reception, however, draws the reader's attention to two topics that refocus the discourse on fame in the English Middle Ages and beyond.

In her Introduction, Isabel Davis concentrates on intertextuality and gendered reputations to explore the different meanings of fama and the issues they raise, by choosing the myth of Dido as it is reframed in the Legend of Good Women. Here Chaucer contrasts the two ancient versions of the myth of the queen of Carthage handed over by Virgil and Ovid, and filters his interpretation of it through his own personal reading of Boccaccio. Not only the meditation on the imagery of light inspired by Alceste, but also the preoccupation with the reputation and name of his characters, and some significant thematic links with the House of Fame and the Canterbury Tales, confirms Chaucer's preoccupation with fame in The Legend of Good Women.

A number of essays in the volume pick up these hints and develop them in significant ways both with regard to Chaucer's work and to the poet's reputation after his death. In the connection of the metaphorical field of light with that of fame, William T. Rossiter ("Chaucer Joins the Schiera: The House of Fame, Italy and the Determination of Posterity") identifies a common ground that, resting on the pillars of claritas and fama, unites The House of Fame, The Clerk's Prologue, and Troilus and Criseyde. Moreover, Rossiter underlines the importance of the language of illumination in early humanism, and singles out luminescence as one of the themes in fifteenth-century Chaucerian criticism, as it appears in Lydgate and Hoccleve. This is also addressed by Joanna Bellis ("'Fresch anamalit termes': The Contradictory Celebrity of Chaucer's Aureation"), who in addition points out the link between Chaucer's praise of Petrarch in the Clerk's Prologue and the celebration of Chaucer after his death. Alcuin Blamires ("'I nolde sette at al that noys a grote': Repudiating Infamy in Troilus and Criseyde and The House of Fame"), besides revealing the poet's preoccupation with names and reputation, maintains that a comparison between Criseida in the Filostrato and Criseyde in Troilus and Criseyde shows how Chaucer interweaves a significant discourse on fame in the story of the two Trojan lovers. Blamires touches upon Chaucer's skepticism toward fame, a topic that also surfaces in Nick Havely's essay, the second of the opening section of the volume devoted to the Latin and Italian sources of Chaucer's poetry. Concentrating on the Italian masters—Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch—Rossiter, Havely, and Elizaveta Strakhov ("'And kis the steppes where as thow seest pace': Reconstructing the Spectral Canon in Statius and Chaucer") investigate the poet's role in the formation of the literary canon of Western literature. Havely takes into account Book 3 of the House of Fame to address the complex intertextual relationship between Dante's Commedia and Chaucer's poem. Havely dwells on the key implications that the passage on fame in Canto 11 of Purgatorio has for Geffrey's visit to the palace of Fame and draws the reader's attention to the poet's "pregnant" silence about the Commedia in his poem. Reconstructing the spectral canon in Statius and Chaucer, as her essay's subtitle puts it, Strakhov shows how the pervasive presence of Statius's Theban tale in the Trojan love story can explain Chaucer's reworking of and negotiation with Boccaccio in...