Chaucer's Squire's Tale, Franklin's Tale, and Physician's Tale: An Annotated Bibliography 1900–2005 ed. by Kenneth Bleeth (review)

For a variety of obvious reasons, the printed bibliography seems destined to go the way of the telephone book, now scarcely used even by those who still keep one at hand. Yet, a less apt but in some ways more telling analogy is the advent of email, for which it is more manifest—for anyone who has ever communicated via handwritten personal letters—how much may be lost when a new form of media, however more powerful, flexible, and convenient, is adapted on a wide scale. I will be sad to see the demise of the printed annotated bibliography, since at its best it offers several invaluable features that its primary replacement—the bibliographical database—does not, features that are readily evident in the volume under review.

Among the most important of these features is a robust narrative of the critical tradition, which this new contribution to the Toronto Chaucer Bibliographies exemplifies. It may well be the nature of literary scholarship, at least that pertaining to a particular work, to ruminate across generations about a relatively limited set of problems with ever more conceptual sophistication and contextual breadth; thus a volume like this both facilitates a more rigorous awareness of how one's scholarship relates to this history of rumination and points the way toward expanding the set of problems that has defined the field. To be sure, there are other places to find such narratives, but none of those can match the depth and scope achieved when introductory essays on the critical tradition are accompanied by nearly 2,000 annotated entries. Much depends, of course, on the dependability of those introductions and annotations, and in this case the former are sound, thoughtful, and judicious, the latter are (as far as I have been able to ascertain) accurate and fair, and both are lucid and informative.

Following the front matter, the volume contains separate introductions to the critical traditions on The Squire's Tale and The Franklin's Tale; a single section for both tales containing annotated entries for editions and modernizations; separate sections for each of the tales for entries on sources, analogues, and later influence; a section for criticism on The Squire's Tale; a section for criticism on the link between the tales; a section for criticism on The Franklin's Tale; and then an introduction to the critical tradition on The Physician's Tale, followed by a section for entries on that tale's sources, analogues, and influence and a section for its criticism. The volume concludes with an appropriately massive index. Because the critical tradition naturally reflects the organization of the Tales as that work has appeared in scholarly editions, the organization of the volume has the same structure, which pairs The Squire's and Franklin's Tales together as Fragment V, while The Physician's Tale leads off Fragment VI (with the other tale in Fragment VI, The Pardoner's, having already received its own Toronto bibliography [ed. Marilyn Sutton, 2000]). That this way of representing the Tales is misleading (Fragment V is not really separate from Fragment IV) is an unfortunate effect of an inherited error in the editorial tradition that the volume further reifies, albeit for considerably better reasons and to much less consequence than the scholarly editions themselves.

Bleeth has subdivided the introductory essays on the critical traditions on The Squire's and Franklin's Tales into sections on those traditions' most prominent concerns. His identification of those concerns is reliable and astute, and his elucidation of how they have been treated succinct and cogent. Inevitably, this organizational strategy has the effect of marginalizing studies that do not fit the schema, and in practice much scholarship addresses issues that cut across categories. But Bleeth is careful to...