Studies in the Age of Chaucer

REVIEWS conversations about Chaucer’s own anti-Judaism had he incorporated another tale [than the Prioress’s] featuring Jews . . . into his compendium ’’ (p. 160). The essays Delany has collected in Chaucer and the Jews thus provide a rich and varied set of starting points for thinking about the importance of Jews and Judaism for medieval culture, Chaucer’s culture, and our own work as medievalists. Steven F. Kruger Queens College and The Graduate Center, The City University of New York Robert R. Edwards, Chaucer and Boccaccio: Antiquity and Modernity. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Pp. xv, 205. $62.00. In his new book, Robert Edwards argues that Chaucer discovered in Boccaccio a way to invent ‘‘antiquity and modernity as areas for poetic imagination and cultural understanding’’ (p. xi). By invention, Edwards means primarily the protocols that guided medieval writers when they filled out what remained unexpressed in antecedent texts. As a species of intertextuality, invention thus is fundamentally rhetorical; although Edwards is very aware that the poets he studies wrote at particular moments in specific places, his goal is to elucidate the shapes ‘‘politics and other historical forces’’ (p. xiii) assume in their literary language. Chaucerian antiquity occupies the first half of Edwards’s study, Chaucerian modernity the second. According to the prevailing view, Chaucer, like most medieval historiographers, thought Athens, Troy, and Rome were memorials to all that human reason and virtue could achieve. Each city, however, fell; as Edwards says, without imaginative supplementation that explained their fate, how could later kings legitimate their rule by proclaiming themselves heirs to these civilizations? Superseded yet still authoritative, classical antiquity became for Boccaccio and Chaucer a surrogate age ideally suited to explore contemporary strains in ‘‘chivalric social forms and established institutions’’ (p. 5). In his first chapter, Edwards describes how Boccaccio domesticated Statius’s ferocious critique of heroism and political power by recasting Theban history as a chronicle of arms, love, and rectitude. Especially in PAGE 381 381 .......................... 10906$ CH11 11-01-10 13:59:33 PS STUDIES IN THE AGE OF CHAUCER the opening books of the Teseida, which recount Theseus’s war against the Amazons, characters owe their nobility not to bloodlines but to the moral agency that informs their actions. Boccaccio thereby proved himself both a poet of war, a subject Dante had said still lacked its singer in the vernacular, and a poet of virtue, the subject he had given the highest palms in the De vulgari eloquentia. Chaucer, however, dropped the account of the war. The excision becomes an emblem for Edwards of the tensions Chaucer thought persisted in the story despite Boccaccio’s efforts to contain them. Although the impetus to order is actually stronger in The Knight’s Tale than in the Teseida, Chaucer substituted slaughter and ceremony for the estimable exercise of arms in Boccaccio’s poem, and he exposed the conventions of courtly love as mystifications of a masculine erotic gaze and fear of rivals . The world of the tale emerges as ‘‘finished but unresolved, with silences and occlusions that challenge its heroic claims’’ and captures the crisis of chivalric identity in Chaucer’s day. In the Troilus, antiquity no longer is merely ‘‘an analogue for courtly life’’ but a surrogate for ‘‘a cultural world buckling under pressure’’ (p. 45). Chaucer diverged from the Filostrato by introducing possible alternatives to the destruction of Troy; history has already determined the city’s doom, but destiny leaves choices open. Love likewise is at once an irresistible force and a matter of consent. Unlike Boccaccio, Chaucer did not cut off the private spaces from the public forums of Troy: ‘‘The poem presents its defining historical frame in a way that preserves a place for intention in public and personal destiny’’ (p. 47). If Thebes and Troy were the locales Chaucer chose to ponder the compromised nobility of heroes trammeled in history and by desire, the women in the Legend enabled him to critique courtly ideologies by dismantling patriarchal, imperial institutions of the past. Chaucer’s ill-used ladies belie any present or latter-day Theseus’s claim that the struggle between free will and destiny is heroic; they discredit any Aeneas’s contention that joining nations...