Historians on Chaucer: The "General Prologue" to the "Canterbury Tales." ed. by Stephen H. Rigby (review)

This intensely useful, encyclopedic, and bracingly straightforward volume assumes correctly that when one reads or teaches Chaucer, one is also reading history, for the Canterbury Tales either holds up a mirror to contemporary life or, more likely, renders reality through the poet's literary imagination in order to pursue its moral and social purposes. In either case, a historical knowledge of the work, institutions, responsibilities, achievements, and failures of people in the professions represented by Chaucer's imaginary characters is extremely important to an understanding of the poet's world and work. This volume accordingly outlines in trenchant historical detail the labors, practices, and daily realities of all the pilgrims vividly, with fierce documentation and sober insight. The volume respectfully references a past such effort (Laura C. Lambdin and Robert T. Lambdin, Chaucer's Pilgrims: An Historical Guide to the Pilgrims in "The Canterbury Tales" [Greenwood, 1999]) and, fifteen years on, provides a new and deeply needed up-to-date reference book about the pilgrims. The distinguished historian Stephan H. Rigby and the equally distinguished polymath Alastair Minnis have assembled a group of crackerjack historians to uncover, survey, summarize, and keenly package a wealth of matters usually explained by overburdened footnotes in Chaucer editions and translations but very seldom expressed in extended discursive fashion. The short, frank preface by Rigby avers that no matter one's historical approach, historians must pay attention to literature in the same way that literary scholars have made a "historical turn" to try to contextualize lives they read about in literary texts. This book will serve both disciplines and their students well.

Some of the chapters—and certainly Rigby's own, on the Knight—are aware of each other and aware of the larger themes of the book, established in the introduction and in the chapter on "Chaucer the Poet and Chaucer the Pilgrim" by Caroline M. Barton. That is: What was Chaucer's intention in depicting all these people in a generally nonjudgmental and (usually) dispassionate way? Is he a satirist supporting social change, or an apologist for the status quo? Or, is he supporting social change by cleverly seeming to support the status quo while really seeking to undermine …, etc., etc. Chaucerians know well all the classic permutations of this inquiry, which testify to how provocatively ambiguous Chaucer's depictions are. No particular political, moral, or even religious perspective can define authoritatively what he presents so dramatically and with so much verisimilitude. The never real is, we find, always real, but not quite.

The chapters, as they report in detail the meanings of terms, practices, and institutional structures (commercial, clerical, social, governmental) only vaguely akin to their modern counterparts (if they exist), engage directly with modern critical perspectives on Chaucer, including the debate about whether to deem him a liberal, a conservative, or a radical. Sometimes we want the text to mean what we want it to mean, but this volume challenges us to contextualize our impressions by considering the realities behind the fictions. Then we are free to critique, defend, emend, reject, or otherwise revise wisely our initial reader responses or well-worn inherited critical beliefs. History is not an answer-key to poetry, and this volume does not pretend it is. And even though in some cases we know the pilgrims are based on real-life models (Harry Bailly and, of course, Chaucer himself for example), "the studies in this volume," as Rigby explains, seek not simply to identify historical models, but rather "to explore the wider issue of how Chaucer's work related to and participated in the social, political, and religious conflicts and controversies of his day" (482). The work is consistently excellent and ever forthright in presentation and tone. Though a reviewer must single out particular contributions in offering concrete examples, readers will have their own favorites and will gravitate to chapters most related...