Chaucer and the Child by Eve Salisbury (review)

As one would expect from the title, Chaucer and the Childconsiders the young characters who are found in Chaucer's collected works. Where do they appear and how does their presence resonate within their narrative contexts? What does the concept of the child mean for Chaucer's literary practice, for its relationship with its historical moment, as well as for the ways in which Chaucer has been read in subsequent historical periods? Salisbury naturally examines narratives where a child plays a central role, such as the little clergeon of the Prioress's Tale, or the youthful Virginia, but treats with comparable deliberation disparate and at times fleeting allusions to infants, children, and youths, down to the disturbing ekphrasis in the Knight's Taleof an infant devoured by a sow in a temple fresco. Salisbury contends that even in examples such as the silent, sleeping baby of the Reeve's Tale, we can—and should—attend to the child's presence; although ostensibly passive, he or she is never truly inconsequential. Accordingly, infants (children under seven) in Chaucer's writing 'emanate meaning by their presence, by the spaces and temporal settings they inhabit, by their proximity to others, by the actions taken on their behalf, and by the objects surrounding them' (pp. 74–75). This insistence on reading for the impact of the presence of a young person within a narrative, even when that individual is disempowered, extends to older children, including adolescents. For example, Salisbury considers the implications of the fox's invasion of the farmyard in the Nun's Priest's Talefor the widow's briefly mentioned (and universally overlooked) daughters. By exploring their youthful female agency within a feminized, single-parent working environment, Salisbury enriches critical understanding of this literary tour de force by drawing attention to the play between fables and modes of childhood instruction, further inflected by gender and social status.

Salisbury's investigation of the child in Chaucer's work extends beyond literal childhood in an extended discussion of the pueror puella senex, a trope that disrupts linear temporality and hierarchical structures, exposing 'a range of biases about youth and age both in the poet's own time and in the stories of previous epochs enfolded into his work' (p. 223). This expands her investigation into a consideration of what it means when characters such as the Prioress and Oswald the Reeve express or claim for themselves childlike characteristics. Whether children bear exceptional features of adulthood or adults emulate the condition of childhood, 'they expose the vulnerability of the child who finds himself or herself in a hostile environment, subject to corrupt institutions and cultural values that put them at risk' (p. 222).

Chaucer and the Childgoes further than offering readings of Chaucer's younger literary personnel, or those who display traits associated with youth. Salisbury aims to liberate Chaucer the author from the constraints of 'paternal function' within which his work has been confined since the fifteenth century, in order to recuperate 'Child Chaucer', who is 'resistant and rebellious, mischievous and sly, obtuse and unpredictable, noisy and carefree, and as capable of conformity and obedience as he is of resisting the conventions that constrain him' (p. 7). 'Child Chaucer' is a creative mode and not confined to representing children; Chaucer's narrative personas in Sir Thopas, The House of Fameand The Book of the Duchessall display non-adult characteristics that in each case inform the status of the text as a vernacular rendition of a mature tradition, or a form of literary infancy. This line of inquiry leads to a reconceptualization of Chaucer's relationship with his own literary sources as 'the recognition of a shared responsibility among like-minded poets involved in a transference of poetry from the past to the present with an eye toward its perpetuation into the future' (p. 228), an expression of 'child likeness...