The Canterbury Tales Handbook by Elizabeth Scala (review)

Norton has been publishing a number of Chaucer editions recently and has finally published a guidebook. The Canterbury Tales Handbook by Elizabeth Scala is tailor-made for college students; the writing is smart, jargon-free, and delightful. The stated goal is deceptively simple: "This book helps you enjoy Chaucer by showing you how to read him more fluidly in the language in which he wrote. Some careful work at the beginning of the semester pays dividends later" (1–2). This comforting promise of enjoyment is gently followed by the promise that the hard work of reading Middle English will be worthwhile. Scala's book is a pleasurable and thought-provoking entry into Chaucer's text.

Much as expected from a guidebook, the chapters, organized by tale, move through the text more or less in order, a structure designed to help students keep track of plot strands and, at the same time, discover deeper meanings. What makes Scala's book feel different from other guidebooks is attentiveness to its primary audience, the college undergraduate; pragmatic questions as to whether students should read from the handbook before or after Chaucer's text, or perhaps consult a translation, are addressed with refreshing transparency. Scala keeps her readers in mind particularly when their expectations might be challenged—for example, readers new to The Knight's Tale might be surprised to find a story set in classical Athens, or surprised that, given all these knights, there is very little action and a whole lot of lengthy descriptions and speeches. The handbook acknowledges such small surprises as well as graver discomforts, such as anti-Semitism in The Prioress's Tale. The voice of the text is very much that of an experienced professor addressing her students (often directly in the second person), sometimes pointing out ambiguity and leaving it open-ended, sometimes making a more decisive pronouncement.

The handbook's focus on close readings is well exemplified by a detailed breakdown of Chaucer's opening lines in The General Prologue. In this deep exploration of a single Middle English sentence, Scala introduces terms such as "connotation" and "denotation" in order to persuade readers that the way a thing is said can matter more than what is said:

Getting the connotation right is important and often tells us a good deal more than the denotation might reveal on its own. In this first half of the sentence, the denotation of many of these words and expressions is the same: "it is raining" or "everything is wet." But the connotation of the words is vastly different. It's raining in a rather elegant and literary way that makes us think of other places, mentioned in other texts, rather than the local environment literally being described. Chaucer here is aggrandizing England in the style of some Continental precursors.

(15–16)

Students learn how to read more closely, and Scala shows how such things as literary rain matter and work as part of Chaucer's strategy.

Scala brilliantly unpacks the poem's twists and turns at the level of the line, revealing contradictions that beg pondering. Here is a lovely example from her analysis of the Clerk's protestation that "yvele it sit / T'assaye a wif whan that it is no neede" (ClT, 460–61):

These first-person statements on the narrator's part have garnered a great deal of critical attention. The Clerk alerts us to what Griselda emphatically cannot: the sadistic unfairness of Walter's tests. For Griselda has promised never to gainsay any of Walter's decisions … the Clerk narratively revels in the suffering ("anguisshe and … drede") of Griselda, at the same time that he distances him-self from it. Since Griselda is forbidden to show any dissent or emotion because of the vow she made to Walter at their wedding, the Clerk is the only means by which Griselda's anguished emotional life is ever known. Just as Walter does within the tale, the Clerk gets...