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Chaucer: An Oxford Guide
The most comprehensive guide to Chaucer's work available, this volume features thirty-seven specially commissioned chapters by an international team of esteemed contributors. Offering work from both academics with long-standing reputations and newer voices in the field, it combines general essays that provide background and contextual information with detailed readings of specific Chaucerian texts. The book devotes an entire section to Chaucer's "afterlife," which considers his reputation in later periods, his influence on later writers, and his presence in modern and contemporary culture. Guides to further reading for each chapter and a chronology are also included.
672 pages, Paperback
First published May 12, 2005
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November 19, 2019
CHAUCER AND POSTMODERNISM, An extract from my review
This Guide is an enormous project in the publishing business, and yet at a very reasonable price. The editor, Steve Ellis, summoned the skills and knowledge of thirty-seven authors to write thirty-six chapters on Chaucer and his works. Just this dimension of the project is impressive. With such a variety of writers, we may understand the book becomes a presentation of the totality of what we may and can know or think about Chaucer, this monument of English literature and the English language.
Such a book targets three different audiences. First, university – and other – libraries who will buy such a book to display it next to Chaucer’s poems for their curious public. When we know how Chaucer was used in the popular film Seven, we can understand that a real fad may exist around this author, but a fad that needs some fuel to live on in, through and even in spite of Chaucer’s language and poetic style. Second, students who will, according to the poems they are working on or the topic they are studying, read some chapters, probably not all. These students will use the copies of the book they will find in their libraries. Finally, Chaucer or Middle English scholars, graduate students, and professionals, who will own the book for their regular work and read it all from cover to cover. We need to add to this first approach the fact that Chaucer has been for more than one century and still is the object of a battle from all kinds of people to make him available in highschool and university syllabi all over the world as a pillar of any English literature and English language programs, not to speak of the exploration necessary to understand the suspense of the film Seven, when studied in highschool classes. This explains the rather low price for such a heavy and even hefty book, and the rather unsophisticated tone and style of some of the chapters. This being said, we can enter the book itself.
It is divided into five sections that aim at covering the whole ground around Chaucer. First the historical context. Second the literary contexts. Third the Readings. Fourth the Afterlife. Fifth and last the Study resources. One formal remark before entering the matter of the book. There is no general bibliography. Each chapter has its own bibliography. This is a shortcoming because it is not easy then to navigate in this inexistent bibliography, and the chapter bibliographies are extremely repetitive. The index helps to find a reference, but only as a second-best procedure, and the reference you are looking for is going to send you back to several places in the book, and not necessarily and immediately to the real bibliography reference you may be looking for.
The second preliminary remark I will do here is that a glossary of Chaucer’s words might have been a good help, particularly for students. The quotations are, and that is absolutely needed to be so, in Middle English, but generally, they are not translated nor accompanied by some lexical notes. These quotations become difficult for people who are not Middle English scholars, or who do not have a Middle English dictionary at hand, or a translated version of the poems (translations that are too often very defective if they are in verse, and always un-understandable, hence insufficient, at the level of Chaucer’s real language, its phonology, its morphology, its lexicon and its syntax, all elements not studied in enough depth in this book. This book is definitely too light at the level of Chaucer’s language and poetics).
I will also here note a strange illustration. The illustration page 114 is oriented left side right or right side left as compared to the section of the same illustration used on the front cover as well as the other section of it used on the back cover. Such an intriguing dis-orientation or misorientation is a flaw in such a serious book.
After these preliminary remarks, I can enter the book itself. I will follow the chapters and the sections and make critical remarks along my reading, because each chapter has a different topic and author, thus all needing a particular approach.
Steve Ellis’s Introduction brings up an idea that is extremely provocative: "the culture of postmodernism finds much that anticipates it in Chaucer". It is difficult to accept the idea of anticipation in history. An event might be the result of a previous situation or another anterior event, the latter event being the cause of the effect that the former is. But the event that came first cannot anticipate the event that came second, as if there were some consciousness of the second in the first. The use of this word "anticipate" implies some teleology of some kind and that is disquieting. This mental vision naturally leads to: "If postmodernism signals the death of meta-narrative - … - then Chaucer might indeed seem to be 'postmodern' ". In spite of the moralizing words "might" and "seem", it is historically, hence mentally, difficult to say that Chaucer could be in any way "postmodern" since he even lived before what we now call the modern period. That is anachronistic to the utmost. That Chaucer might have been an inspiration to modern artists, writers or scholars, that is understandable, but the reverse movement is impossible since history is a constant and continuous flow in one direction only. But the great merit of this introduction is that it brings us directly and immediately inside the dilemma that is going to be ours all along: how can we assess the historical value of Chaucer and his poems without discarding or limiting the artistic potential of the poems, and the poems only.
First Part: Historical contexts
We are surprised by the plural of this title. There is only one historical context and there can't be more than one even if that context is contradictory. We live in one time, in one place, in one social group and each one of these is contradictory and thus may look multifarious, but they are not. If we state they are multifarious then we freeze history because its evolution can only come from and through these contradictions, just as we freeze any possible meaning that can only come from a global analysis and not a scattered vision. That reminds me of Sartre's image of the can of peas which is one as long as the can contains the peas. If we do not state the unity of each time-place-society seen globally (the globality of the time of course that could not take into account the southern hemisphere and the western hemisphere and a few other areas that had not yet been discovered by Europeans), then we cannot conceive of any historical dynamism, hence of any historical meaning. This approach does not say there is only one meaning possible for each time-place-society. But it says that there is no meaning possible if there is not a unified vision of a time-place-society containing contradictions that dictate its historical evolution.
Ruth Evans considers Chaucer's life and at once tries to make clear that Chaucer's life is important because it determines Chaucer's work, if we follow what Michel Foucault calls, without necessarily agreeing, 'the-man-and-his-work criticism'. So, she does explore Chaucer's non-aristocratic gentile-ness. She does identify the 'upward social mobility' that characterizes the post-plague period; though she does not push the reasoning far enough. When a society loses something like one-third of its population within a few years or a couple of decades, it is quite obvious many problems are captured differently. Social mobility becomes a necessity to fill in the empty positions in the administrative professions. Though the feudal society could be seen as very frozen socially, in this period it is impossible to close up the elite groups and the noble class. But when the very society, in fact the very species, seems to be fighting for its survival, the actions that will ensure this survival of the species are no longer seen with any possible distantiation or even moral criticism: this society needs to produce children just like so many commodities, women have to produce as many children as possible, i.e. one a year or so, and procreation can no longer be limited in time and age: as soon as a woman can become pregnant she has to be procreationally productive. In such a society sex and love become neglected elements and even side-effects of what is essential: to repopulate the world if the world is not supposed to die. And what's more the English crown gets entangled in the One Hundred Years' War. In other words, in this chapter we do not get any kind of fleshy, concrete social and cultural vision of Chaucer's life. Luckily, Ruth Evans turns to Michel Foucault's theory of the author-function to approach the poet. But she imports the concept without adapting it to the concrete situation of the time. There cannot be anything looking like what Foucault calls an author in the 15th century, before printing. But Chaucer is a writer or a poet, and it is this function that has to be explored concretely in the 15th-century English society to understand the 'author-function' in those days. One element has to be kept in mind: the author is a character, a persona in society that has a function that may have little to do with the person and his real function and profession behind this author. As a person Chaucer is an administrative civil servant of the time, but as a persona he deals with the reality he sees and reflects/distorts in his verse in order to entertain in any positive or negative way a public that has to be defined. That is this reflection/distortion/entertainment that represents the function of the persona the poet Chaucer is in his society, beside or behind the person he is really, and in his mind it might be the reverse, the persona being the center and the person being the periphery. Though she is coming close to this re-evaluation of Chaucer I am harping at when she says: "Today's academic Chaucer cuts a very different figure: cultured, cosmopolitan, elusive, and postmodern, he is more likely to be catching a plane to Renaissance Italy than tripping through a medieval English meadow". This remark ignores both the author-function of the persona Chaucer the poet, and the reader-function of the persona/ae of the reader/s of Chaucer who may take him along onto the plane that might fly them to present-day Florence or present-day Sussex with their minds tuned onto the persona/ae of those who are going to try to get back to these old Renaissance, pre-Renaissance, post-plague times in the 15th century with the help of the poems by the persona Chaucer that they carry in their pocket like a book, in their mind as a recollection or knowledge, in their computer as a set of digitalized files. And yet her last sentence shows she feels there must be something along that line she does not identify entirely: "There are documents to find in the archives; there is historical work to be done, particularly on Chaucer as a man of letters; and the life-records will be resifted and reread with different political agendas, generating new meanings and making new and unforeseeable connections". She feels the reader (critic, scholar or common) reads Chaucer from his own point of view and has the tendency to project this point of view into Chaucer, which means she is approaching the persona of the reader, and yet she aims at understanding the person Chaucer and not the persona Chaucer the poet, because she does not state the fact that the poems are a fixed, closed and frozen body of literary meaningful elements that cannot be changed and that have to contain the potential of any reading if these readings want to be in any way objective. Besides the persona of the reader and the persona of the poet, we have to state the '(could-we-call-it)-persona' of the poem. It is a trilogy that is going to be missing all along this book. I have been a little bit long on the question because it is central, and it is visible from the very start that it is not captured at all by most of the authors and only approached or hinted at by a few. I am speaking here more as a linguist who knows that a message can only be understood if we capture and state the three elements that constitute (I use this word because it refers to a constitution, what the Germans call a 'grundgesetz', some rock bottom principle) a communicational situation: SPEAKER – MESSAGE – HEARER. The poet-persona encodes his/her conscious/unconscious meaning (determined by his/her impulses, desires and objectives within his/her vision and experience of his/her society and world) into the message that the reader-persona decodes or deciphers (determined as he/she is by his/her impulses, desires and objectives within his/her vision and experience of his/her society and world).
Let's note the people who came closest to this approach are Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, without forgetting Jacques Derrida, though we could and should quote here Freud, Jung, Reich, Lacan, Kenneth Burke, Julia Kristeva and many others, though I have the impression that over the last twenty years or so no true new breakthrough has been registered, and the present book shows how dead the dead-end is, or how blind the blind alley is.
S.H. Rigby scrutinizes the society and its politics. Starting from the three estates of feudal society, he analyses the consequences of the plague on these social structures. The gentle social class was only four percent of the population. Twenty percent of it lived on the profits of commerce. More than fifty percent of the population lived on wages. In 1377 two percent of the population (38,000 people including 2,000 nuns) were clerics, and the church-owned at least one-third of England and the tithes brought in ten percent of all forms of production or income. The Plague then had a catastrophic effect on such a society: food prices declined, and wages went up, and women managed to get some independence in this situation, though the author asserts it was only short-lived. Then the author evokes the 1381 revolts whose first and foremost demand was to abolish serfdom. Though this rebellion was crushed, and serfdom was not abolished, in 1500 serfdom had become virtually extinct. This enables S.H. Rigby to push aside the interpretation that Chaucer was an orthodox, conservative or even reactionary writer, in favor of the idea that "Chaucer's own poetic achievement [strains] to achieve the polyphony of competing voices which gives the Canterbury Tales its veracity". In the political field, the author is just as much inspired as in the social field. He analyses Edward III, the Hundred Years' War and the deposition of Richard II. This leads him to show how in this period the concept of political authority appeared and started building up. [. . . ]
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
This Guide is an enormous project in the publishing business, and yet at a very reasonable price. The editor, Steve Ellis, summoned the skills and knowledge of thirty-seven authors to write thirty-six chapters on Chaucer and his works. Just this dimension of the project is impressive. With such a variety of writers, we may understand the book becomes a presentation of the totality of what we may and can know or think about Chaucer, this monument of English literature and the English language.
Such a book targets three different audiences. First, university – and other – libraries who will buy such a book to display it next to Chaucer’s poems for their curious public. When we know how Chaucer was used in the popular film Seven, we can understand that a real fad may exist around this author, but a fad that needs some fuel to live on in, through and even in spite of Chaucer’s language and poetic style. Second, students who will, according to the poems they are working on or the topic they are studying, read some chapters, probably not all. These students will use the copies of the book they will find in their libraries. Finally, Chaucer or Middle English scholars, graduate students, and professionals, who will own the book for their regular work and read it all from cover to cover. We need to add to this first approach the fact that Chaucer has been for more than one century and still is the object of a battle from all kinds of people to make him available in highschool and university syllabi all over the world as a pillar of any English literature and English language programs, not to speak of the exploration necessary to understand the suspense of the film Seven, when studied in highschool classes. This explains the rather low price for such a heavy and even hefty book, and the rather unsophisticated tone and style of some of the chapters. This being said, we can enter the book itself.
It is divided into five sections that aim at covering the whole ground around Chaucer. First the historical context. Second the literary contexts. Third the Readings. Fourth the Afterlife. Fifth and last the Study resources. One formal remark before entering the matter of the book. There is no general bibliography. Each chapter has its own bibliography. This is a shortcoming because it is not easy then to navigate in this inexistent bibliography, and the chapter bibliographies are extremely repetitive. The index helps to find a reference, but only as a second-best procedure, and the reference you are looking for is going to send you back to several places in the book, and not necessarily and immediately to the real bibliography reference you may be looking for.
The second preliminary remark I will do here is that a glossary of Chaucer’s words might have been a good help, particularly for students. The quotations are, and that is absolutely needed to be so, in Middle English, but generally, they are not translated nor accompanied by some lexical notes. These quotations become difficult for people who are not Middle English scholars, or who do not have a Middle English dictionary at hand, or a translated version of the poems (translations that are too often very defective if they are in verse, and always un-understandable, hence insufficient, at the level of Chaucer’s real language, its phonology, its morphology, its lexicon and its syntax, all elements not studied in enough depth in this book. This book is definitely too light at the level of Chaucer’s language and poetics).
I will also here note a strange illustration. The illustration page 114 is oriented left side right or right side left as compared to the section of the same illustration used on the front cover as well as the other section of it used on the back cover. Such an intriguing dis-orientation or misorientation is a flaw in such a serious book.
After these preliminary remarks, I can enter the book itself. I will follow the chapters and the sections and make critical remarks along my reading, because each chapter has a different topic and author, thus all needing a particular approach.
Steve Ellis’s Introduction brings up an idea that is extremely provocative: "the culture of postmodernism finds much that anticipates it in Chaucer". It is difficult to accept the idea of anticipation in history. An event might be the result of a previous situation or another anterior event, the latter event being the cause of the effect that the former is. But the event that came first cannot anticipate the event that came second, as if there were some consciousness of the second in the first. The use of this word "anticipate" implies some teleology of some kind and that is disquieting. This mental vision naturally leads to: "If postmodernism signals the death of meta-narrative - … - then Chaucer might indeed seem to be 'postmodern' ". In spite of the moralizing words "might" and "seem", it is historically, hence mentally, difficult to say that Chaucer could be in any way "postmodern" since he even lived before what we now call the modern period. That is anachronistic to the utmost. That Chaucer might have been an inspiration to modern artists, writers or scholars, that is understandable, but the reverse movement is impossible since history is a constant and continuous flow in one direction only. But the great merit of this introduction is that it brings us directly and immediately inside the dilemma that is going to be ours all along: how can we assess the historical value of Chaucer and his poems without discarding or limiting the artistic potential of the poems, and the poems only.
First Part: Historical contexts
We are surprised by the plural of this title. There is only one historical context and there can't be more than one even if that context is contradictory. We live in one time, in one place, in one social group and each one of these is contradictory and thus may look multifarious, but they are not. If we state they are multifarious then we freeze history because its evolution can only come from and through these contradictions, just as we freeze any possible meaning that can only come from a global analysis and not a scattered vision. That reminds me of Sartre's image of the can of peas which is one as long as the can contains the peas. If we do not state the unity of each time-place-society seen globally (the globality of the time of course that could not take into account the southern hemisphere and the western hemisphere and a few other areas that had not yet been discovered by Europeans), then we cannot conceive of any historical dynamism, hence of any historical meaning. This approach does not say there is only one meaning possible for each time-place-society. But it says that there is no meaning possible if there is not a unified vision of a time-place-society containing contradictions that dictate its historical evolution.
Ruth Evans considers Chaucer's life and at once tries to make clear that Chaucer's life is important because it determines Chaucer's work, if we follow what Michel Foucault calls, without necessarily agreeing, 'the-man-and-his-work criticism'. So, she does explore Chaucer's non-aristocratic gentile-ness. She does identify the 'upward social mobility' that characterizes the post-plague period; though she does not push the reasoning far enough. When a society loses something like one-third of its population within a few years or a couple of decades, it is quite obvious many problems are captured differently. Social mobility becomes a necessity to fill in the empty positions in the administrative professions. Though the feudal society could be seen as very frozen socially, in this period it is impossible to close up the elite groups and the noble class. But when the very society, in fact the very species, seems to be fighting for its survival, the actions that will ensure this survival of the species are no longer seen with any possible distantiation or even moral criticism: this society needs to produce children just like so many commodities, women have to produce as many children as possible, i.e. one a year or so, and procreation can no longer be limited in time and age: as soon as a woman can become pregnant she has to be procreationally productive. In such a society sex and love become neglected elements and even side-effects of what is essential: to repopulate the world if the world is not supposed to die. And what's more the English crown gets entangled in the One Hundred Years' War. In other words, in this chapter we do not get any kind of fleshy, concrete social and cultural vision of Chaucer's life. Luckily, Ruth Evans turns to Michel Foucault's theory of the author-function to approach the poet. But she imports the concept without adapting it to the concrete situation of the time. There cannot be anything looking like what Foucault calls an author in the 15th century, before printing. But Chaucer is a writer or a poet, and it is this function that has to be explored concretely in the 15th-century English society to understand the 'author-function' in those days. One element has to be kept in mind: the author is a character, a persona in society that has a function that may have little to do with the person and his real function and profession behind this author. As a person Chaucer is an administrative civil servant of the time, but as a persona he deals with the reality he sees and reflects/distorts in his verse in order to entertain in any positive or negative way a public that has to be defined. That is this reflection/distortion/entertainment that represents the function of the persona the poet Chaucer is in his society, beside or behind the person he is really, and in his mind it might be the reverse, the persona being the center and the person being the periphery. Though she is coming close to this re-evaluation of Chaucer I am harping at when she says: "Today's academic Chaucer cuts a very different figure: cultured, cosmopolitan, elusive, and postmodern, he is more likely to be catching a plane to Renaissance Italy than tripping through a medieval English meadow". This remark ignores both the author-function of the persona Chaucer the poet, and the reader-function of the persona/ae of the reader/s of Chaucer who may take him along onto the plane that might fly them to present-day Florence or present-day Sussex with their minds tuned onto the persona/ae of those who are going to try to get back to these old Renaissance, pre-Renaissance, post-plague times in the 15th century with the help of the poems by the persona Chaucer that they carry in their pocket like a book, in their mind as a recollection or knowledge, in their computer as a set of digitalized files. And yet her last sentence shows she feels there must be something along that line she does not identify entirely: "There are documents to find in the archives; there is historical work to be done, particularly on Chaucer as a man of letters; and the life-records will be resifted and reread with different political agendas, generating new meanings and making new and unforeseeable connections". She feels the reader (critic, scholar or common) reads Chaucer from his own point of view and has the tendency to project this point of view into Chaucer, which means she is approaching the persona of the reader, and yet she aims at understanding the person Chaucer and not the persona Chaucer the poet, because she does not state the fact that the poems are a fixed, closed and frozen body of literary meaningful elements that cannot be changed and that have to contain the potential of any reading if these readings want to be in any way objective. Besides the persona of the reader and the persona of the poet, we have to state the '(could-we-call-it)-persona' of the poem. It is a trilogy that is going to be missing all along this book. I have been a little bit long on the question because it is central, and it is visible from the very start that it is not captured at all by most of the authors and only approached or hinted at by a few. I am speaking here more as a linguist who knows that a message can only be understood if we capture and state the three elements that constitute (I use this word because it refers to a constitution, what the Germans call a 'grundgesetz', some rock bottom principle) a communicational situation: SPEAKER – MESSAGE – HEARER. The poet-persona encodes his/her conscious/unconscious meaning (determined by his/her impulses, desires and objectives within his/her vision and experience of his/her society and world) into the message that the reader-persona decodes or deciphers (determined as he/she is by his/her impulses, desires and objectives within his/her vision and experience of his/her society and world).
Let's note the people who came closest to this approach are Umberto Eco, Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault, without forgetting Jacques Derrida, though we could and should quote here Freud, Jung, Reich, Lacan, Kenneth Burke, Julia Kristeva and many others, though I have the impression that over the last twenty years or so no true new breakthrough has been registered, and the present book shows how dead the dead-end is, or how blind the blind alley is.
S.H. Rigby scrutinizes the society and its politics. Starting from the three estates of feudal society, he analyses the consequences of the plague on these social structures. The gentle social class was only four percent of the population. Twenty percent of it lived on the profits of commerce. More than fifty percent of the population lived on wages. In 1377 two percent of the population (38,000 people including 2,000 nuns) were clerics, and the church-owned at least one-third of England and the tithes brought in ten percent of all forms of production or income. The Plague then had a catastrophic effect on such a society: food prices declined, and wages went up, and women managed to get some independence in this situation, though the author asserts it was only short-lived. Then the author evokes the 1381 revolts whose first and foremost demand was to abolish serfdom. Though this rebellion was crushed, and serfdom was not abolished, in 1500 serfdom had become virtually extinct. This enables S.H. Rigby to push aside the interpretation that Chaucer was an orthodox, conservative or even reactionary writer, in favor of the idea that "Chaucer's own poetic achievement [strains] to achieve the polyphony of competing voices which gives the Canterbury Tales its veracity". In the political field, the author is just as much inspired as in the social field. He analyses Edward III, the Hundred Years' War and the deposition of Richard II. This leads him to show how in this period the concept of political authority appeared and started building up. [. . . ]
Dr. Jacques COULARDEAU
June 20, 2018
This Oxford guide to Chaucer was one of the set books for a course about Chaucer I took. This guide consistes of dozens of secondary texts by different authors, all focussing on different aspects of Chaucer's life, his works, social and historical contexts, or literary theory and criticism. All in all, this is a great companion to anyone reading Chaucer and really helps you understand his works better.
January 9, 2008
Far too hefty and thorough for any one-semester Chaucer course, the Chaucer Oxford guide will probably serve best as a general resource for a class in the library reserves. In that function, it might well be indispensable for ANY Chaucer class. Most of the essays are very good, and, from what I can tell, it is miles away better than the hoary Cambridge guide (which even in its second edition features, by contrast to the up-to-the-minute readings of the Oxford guide, all the best readings of the 1970s and slightly beyond).
January 13, 2008
I gave a chapter to this book so I'm biased ... but I've sued it twice in my Chaucer class and found its essays perfect for the undergrad classroom. Burger's piece was loved and hated with exactly the kind of passion that made for an excellent conversation.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews