Chaucer and Religious Controversies in the Medieval and Early Modern Eras by Nancy Bradley Warren (review)

It is something of a commonplace that Early Modern reformers considered Geoffrey Chaucer to have proto-Protestant proclivities. In her new book, however, Nancy Bradley Warren tells a rather more complex and interesting story about the understanding and appropriation of Chaucer in the religious controversies in the three centuries after the poet’s death. From the readers of Chaucer in fifteenth-century nunneries to references to Chaucer in texts circulating in colonial America, Warren here shows that Chaucer and his characters were ripe for religious appropriation. Warren is an expert guide to this history. She has long been a student of the reception of medieval religious texts in the postmedieval world, charting the movements of texts and ideas diachronically and transnationally, as in her 2010 book The Embodied Word, which brilliantly mapped the reception of medieval English women’s spiritual writing by readers and communities in Europe during and after the Reformation. In this new book she casts an even broader net. Considering the complex relationships between religious identity, gender, and national affiliation, Warren shows how post-Chaucerian writers laid claim to very different versions of the poet for their own competing polemical ends.

After a brief introduction to the book’s main concerns, Warren explores how Chaucer himself sets up these issues. Her first chapter, “Female Spiritual and Religious Controversy in the Canterbury Tales,” considers how three tales narrated by women—The Wife of Bath, the Prioress, and the Second Nun—show Chaucer to be interested in women’s religious speech and teaching and “engaged with female spirituality as a vibrant, contentious cultural phenomenon within which the innovatively orthodox and the emergently heretical emerge” (p. 16). The Chaucer that emerges in Warren’s reading of these three tales is neither exactly heterodox nor entirely orthodox, but rather is aware of and in conversation with both Lollard and Brigittine writings. Though scholars have long debated Chaucer’s engagement with Lollardy, as Warren notes, fewer have attended to the possible influence of Brigittine spirituality—with its focus on vernacularity, incarnation, the maternal, and Marian devotion—on texts such as the “Prioress’s Tale.” Warren ultimately argues that the Chaucer who emerges from these tales is a complex, ambiguous, and malleable figure, one thus ripe for appropriation by both orthodox and reformist thinkers in later periods.

The second chapter, “Chaucer, the Chaucerian Tradition, and Female Monastic Readers” focuses on the reception of Chaucer in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries in two powerful English nunneries, Amesbury and Syon Abbey, by examining a single manuscript from each abbey containing material in the Chaucerian tradition. The two fifteenth-century manuscripts that Warren considers are Oxford, Bodleian Library Laud misc. 416, once owned by Syon Abbey; and British Library Additional 18632, owned by the nuns at Amesbury. Perhaps surprisingly given their monastic audience, these are not compilations of religious materials, but rather selections of texts on courtly and political subjects. Notably, the only text by Chaucer included in either manuscript is an imperfect version of the Parliament of Fowls (the first 142 lines of the poem appear in Laud misc. 416). Both manuscripts, though, contain texts in the Chaucerian tradition, including Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes and Hoccleve’s Regiment of Princes, which praise Chaucer as a model of both “literary auctoritas but also of political gravitas” (p. 43). Noting that the Chaucer imagined in these manuscripts is a devout, orthodox, and didactic figure, Warren argues that for the politically connected women of these two abbeys, Chaucerian texts “provided a means of self-fashioning and identity formation as they negotiated fraught periods of political and religious turmoil” (p. 48). The final section of the chapter turns to another manuscript owned by the nuns of Syon Abbey: Oxford, Jesus MS 39, which contains a treatise Disce mori comprised of selections from didactic and catechetical material including a passage excerpted...