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Reviewed by:
  • Chaucer: Visual Approaches ed. by Susanna Fein and David Raybin
  • Nancy Mason Bradbury
Susanna Fein and David Raybin, eds. Chaucer: Visual Approaches. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2016. Pp. xxiv, 302. $69.95 cloth; $34.95 paper.

Scholars of Middle English literature have reasons already to be grateful to Susanna Fein and David Raybin, and the splendid co-edited volume reviewed here adds yet another. Initiating collaborative projects, minding gaps in the scholarship of our field, fostering community: their contribution extends well beyond co-editing Chaucer Review, the journal whose fiftieth anniversary this handsome book celebrates. Chaucer: Visual Approaches offers a wealth of images, fresh ways to think about them, and fruitful exploration of their many implications for reading Chaucer.

The current digitally assisted renaissance in manuscript studies and recent advances, theoretical and practical, in the larger study of the material book have led to deeper and more ambitious investigations into premodern reading practices, an inquiry to which the essays in this volume contribute. Building on an indispensable foundation of earlier research into manuscript production and ownership, scholars have begun to ask more searching questions about what exactly late medieval [End Page 361] readers did with their texts. How did they read? What imaginative associations did they make between words on a page and the contexts they brought to their reading, including their experience of images? How did aspects of page design condition their responses? Such questions call for the kinds of deeply researched, cross-disciplinary scholarship so generously on offer in this collection.

Part 1, "Ways of Seeing," begins with Ashby Kinch's "Intervisual Texts, Intertextual Images: Chaucer and the Luttrell Psalter." Using the example of two distinguished scholars, a literary critic and an art historian, who draw upon the Luttrell Psalter in studies of lasting value, Kinch argues that each one nevertheless falls short of a methodology in which image and text stand as aesthetic equals. Bringing the two together into a reciprocal relationship in which neither is reduced to "static cultural evidence," "free of mediating context," will require "new reading procedures," including attention to intervisuality, a counterpart of intertextuality meant to encourage the reading of images with the same awareness of context, mediation, multiple meanings, and other sources of complexity we bring to reading texts such as Chaucer's (4, 12, 20). Kinch's is only one of many ambitious goals to emerge from this volume, and the full reciprocity for which he calls need not govern all visual approaches, but this opening essay sets a laudably high bar for cross-disciplinary work: the editors call it "bracing" (xvii).

Two essays in Part 1, Alexandra Cook's "Creative Memory and Visual Image in Chaucer's House of Fame" and Kathryn Vulić's "The Vernon Paternoster Diagram, Medieval Graphic Design, and the Parson's Tale," bring consideration of the visual to the project of mapping premodern reading practices. Both explore spatial models, one virtual and one material, for navigating, interpreting, and remembering texts. Cook's essay tracks Chaucer's thematization in The House of Fame of the artificial memory system taught by scholars such as John of Garland, showing how Chaucer's poem draws upon the imagined places of memory systems as a means of literary invention as well as a way of recalling the ancient past. Vulić seeks to fill in a lacuna in The Parson's Tale, the narrator's deflection of an exposition of the Paternoster to "maistres of theologie," by close-reading a wonderfully intricate diagram that explicates the prayer's contents and theological connections; her aim is to show "how images can facilitate the sort of devotional work the Parson's text advocates" (62). Between the two, Sarah Stanbury's "'Quy la?': The Counting-House, the Shipman's Tale, and Architectural Interiors" carries [End Page 362] forward her groundbreaking work on materiality and domestic spaces in Chaucer, here focused on the counting-house as a relatively new interior space, a choice of setting that offers "a metacommentary on changing spatial and social practices of bourgeois life" (41). A final section reads Chaucer's counting-house against a rich array of contemporary paintings in which architectural cutaways...

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