Telling Images: Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative (review)

Telling Images, the long-awaited sequel to Chaucer and the Imagery of Narrative: The First Five Canterbury Tales (Stanford, 1984), confirms V. A. Kolve's status as one of his generation's preeminent scholar-critics of Middle English literature. Although six of its eight chapters have been previously published, having them packaged so conveniently and beautifully with their 157 illustrations and 112 pages of supporting notes and index makes the wait worthwhile.

Unlike the first installment, which focused on the opening two fragments of the Canterbury Tales, Telling Images includes chapters not only on other Chaucerian works (Chapter 1, "Looking at the Sun in Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde"; and Chapter 2, "From Cleopatra to Alceste: An Iconographic Study of The Legend of Good Women"), but also on the God-denying fool ubiquitous in medieval psalters and on the so-called medieval religion of love (Chapter 8). In lieu of a formal conclusion, which could have provided greater coherence to what Kolve acknowledges to be a collection of "occasional pieces" (xvi), this chapter serves as the author's "Retraction," discussing "my personal situation for the first time, confessing to a dilemma I have never wholly resolved: how to teach and write 'from within' Christian systems of thought without appearing to acquiesce in beliefs I do not share" (xvii). The struggle with this dilemma clearly informs the volume's nuanced humanism, which characterizes Kolve's scholarship since its auspicious beginning with The Play Called Corpus Christi (Stanford University Press, 1966).

Methodologically, Telling Images does not break new ground as did the 1984 volume, which included opening chapters detailing Kolve's hypotheses regarding the audience of medieval imagery and a theory of narrative images. In our review (SAC 7 [1985]: 212-18), Ronald B. Herzman and I praised the book's comprehensive readings but questioned some of its assumptions and worried about its juxtaposition of literary and visual images wrenched from their historical, geographic, social, and functional contexts. Nevertheless, the chapters were important meditations on the thorny issues that arise when scholars seek to negotiate the complex relationships between medieval artistic and literary cultures and to calculate the extent to which visual and verbal images did not just reflect but fully informed an assumed late medieval aesthetic. Kolve's notion of a narrative image is an important and useful hermeneutic tool. Unfortunately, the present volume does not forward the methodology delineated twenty-five years earlier, despite significant advancements by both literary (e.g., Mary Carruthers) and art (e.g., Jeffrey Hamburger) historians studying how images functioned in particular contexts for specific patrons and communities of viewers and readers. The older methodology tends to deploy visual analogues primarily to illustrate literary readings and not as works worthy of meticulous scrutiny in their own right. Picking and choosing from an impressive repertoire of images, Kolve highlights the crucial detail that supports his reading, while ignoring other, sometimes more visually prominent forms. Such use of visual evidence will disappoint but not surprise art historians, who are accustomed to literary critics privileging word over image.

As a work of literary criticism, Telling Images should be judged by its success in advancing our understanding of Chaucer, particularly in its two new chapters on The Merchant's Tale (both titled "Of Calendars and Cuckoldry"). The first (Chapter 4, subtitled "January and May in The Merchant's Tale") begins by assuming that the pear tree incident is "the tale's 'governing image'—the first image likely to come to mind as readers or listeners think back on what they remember of the tale" (93). For me, the tale's most memorable image is not this scene but the revealing and typically understated Chaucerian moment when May tears Damian's love letter "And in the pryvee softely it caste" (IV.1954); for purposes of this review, however, I will become the reader Kolve imagines. He immediately draws our attention to a woodcut depicting two lovers in the foliage of a...