This reference work is organized not in sections on each of Chaucer’s works, but in a series of 29 thematic chapters arranged alphabetically, from “Afterlife” to “Women”. The editor feared “alienating users with an over‐familiar approach” and considered that it would be “more exciting to foreground issues and themes”. Its ambition appears in the opening paragraphs, in which Brown evokes those famous literary companions, Scipio Africanus, Virgil, and Lady Philosophy; Brown hopes to avoid their “worst shortcomings” while providing “stimulating advice and guidance; to identify the terms of current debates …; to demonstrate how, in practice, particular ideas and theories affect the interpretation of Chaucer’s texts”. The work is aimed at both scholars and students.
It is difficult to serve such a large audience well. Certain essays seem distinctly suited to one side or the other of the student/scholar divide. The annotated bibliography following each essay is a great asset, but there is no unified bibliography to help the reader who vaguely remembers a book he or she wanted to look at: was it following “Personal Identity” or “Language”? The index does not list character names, such as Criseyde, even where these characters are discussed in essays; nor does it list “Cecily Chaumpaigne,” though one can read about Cecily on page 252, indexed as “Chaucer and the rape/abduction incident”.
Some of the distinguished authors of these essays, like Nicholas Watson and Derek Brewer (“Christian Ideologies” and “Chivalry” respectively), seem to aim their essays at students, producing highly readable and valuable introductions to these topics, with little that will be truly new to the experienced Chaucer scholar. Other essays, such as Nicky Hallet’s and Andrew Galloway’s (“Women” and “Authority”), may contain genuinely new insights for scholars but use so many specialized terms and rhetorically complex sentences as to be beyond any but the most sophisticated students. Occasional errors, such as a reference to Emelye as Theseus’s daughter on page 34, are immaterial to authors’ arguments but can confuse students.
Notable essays include that of Linda Voigt, “Bodies”, in which she shows human and celestial bodies to be related in medieval thought; this could be usefully juxtaposed to “Geography and Travel”, by Scott D. Westrem, which has interesting things to say about maps and Chaucer’s sense of geographical space. Michael Hanly on “France” and David Wallace on “Italy” give excellent overviews of Chaucer’s relationship to these two countries. Helen Phillips deals efficiently and insightfully with the many varieties of “Love” that appear in Chaucer’s works. “Modes of Representation” (Edward Wheatley) and “Narrative” (Robert R. Edwards) both live up to the collection’s aim; these essays do speak to a wide range of interests, and could be profitably read both by those new to Chaucer’s works and by old hands.
One advantage to the organization by theme is that it may encourage readers, especially beginners, to think beyond expected categories. The alphabetical juxtapositions are sometimes felicitous, as in “Texts” (Tim William Machan) and “Translation” (Roger Ellis), which comment on related yet distinct aspects of creating literary works. A reader questioning the separation of “Social Structure” and “Authority” or that of “Christian Ideologies” and “Pagan Survivals” begins to think in new ways about power and religion in the fourteenth century as well as in Chaucer’s works; in this respect, the book succeeds admirably in its aim to stimulate and guide.
All essays share a common organization, designed to give unity to the collection: after an introductory section, each discusses three passages from Chaucer’s works, different passages in almost every case, which helps to give a degree of comprehensiveness; however, the overall effect is of piecemeal treatment of illustrative material. This book hovers somewhere between being a genuine reference work and a collection of essays on disparate themes, whose authors’ varying theoretical allegiances create strong differences of tone and language from one essay to the next. This may be an advantage for advanced students, who thus can study “theory” at work on a single author; it may be a matter of indifference or of irritation for scholars, depending on their own preferred ideologies; for beginning students, I think it would be wildly confusing.
Overall, this is a useful book, providing an up‐to‐date survey of the state of Chaucer scholarship on a wide range of issues; while I suggest caution in sending students to it unsupervised, it will provoke interesting and educational debates in and out of the classroom. It in no way replaces the Oxford Guides to Chaucer, but certainly makes an opinionated and rousing companion to them.
