John M. Hill

    To review recent scholarship on the tales of Canterbury, I found myself reading the work of many intelligent and learned colleagues. Having spent a few years on Chaucer studies myself, I already knew something about what was in print and about what Chaucerians were saying at conferences. I am happy to report that Chaucer scholars now have few settled opinions about things Chaucerian: not even his standing as an ironist of some kind is secure; and a growing number of scholars think that Chaucer here and there drops his mask, while a few still think that Chaucer never adopted a mask in the first place. So feel free to enter the fray: all is in flux. But I am unhappy to report that not even major studies of the tales have more than a passing impact on occasional reviewers and ourselves. This seems both a curious and an appalling affair. I would like to explore it as a way of suggesting the state of Canterbury Tales studies; and I would like to focus mainly on the biggest of recent works Donald Howard's The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (although I understand that Professor Kolve has begun publishing his massive study of Chaucer and medieval pictorial art).

    What does Donald Howard say that should call us to attention? My rereading of Howard's Idea raised at least six areas for contention. I will go through them singly, more or less as they still occur to me, but in hopes of avoiding the fate of Chaucer's Monk.

    1) Chaucer meant most of what we have as the tales of Canterbury to assume the Ellesmere order and to look largely as the Ellesmere does: with junctures, headlinks, and abrupt beginnings much as we have them. Chaucer's conception is complete, although the actual work is incomplete.

    2) The form of the tales is like an illuminated capital, with a miniature or miniatures inside an interlace. Only this analogy is a schematic approximation: the General Prologue and the pilgrimage story, along with the Parson's Prologue and Tale, constitute an outer form, inside which the wandering by the way of tellers, tale-tellings, and tales implicates an interlace at the level of subject and theme as we move from tale to tale and group to group.

    3) Also we have the idea, the form, of a remembered pilgrimage within which is the memory in each pilgrim's case of a tale. And we have a pilgrimage or a labyrinth-like wandering as the progress or perhaps the structure of the Work.

    4) This fiction of a remembered pilgrimage and of remembered tales has contextual implications: we recall a whole a book with beginning and end, much as we see a highly structured, symmetrical whole when we look at a Rose window. The idea of a whole implicates ideas of order and time, of Creator and created, of eternity and change ideas recalled through the opening images of spring and flowers. Stylistically, however, this whole with its cosmic implications is expressed paradoxically as unfolding in time, in a state

    5) The tales of Canterbury, then, concern the world in time and its ways, as experienced or as relevant to at least three domains of life: the public, the domestic, and the private. This division reflects an organization of the tales and the fragments into five parts, following the main junctures in the Ellesmere manuscript and allowing the Physician's and the Pardoner's Tales to "float." We have within groups, moreover, an organization by pairs; and across groups we have a kind of metathematic impetus that places the Melibee above all tales of noble, public character, the Second Nun's Tale above the Melibee, and the Parson's Tale beyond all the tales another book, in effect, to be read differently from the Canterbury book, and to be used as a way of reflecting back in memory upon the whole of the Canterbury book and its parts.

    6) This leads us to bookness and so to Howard's final contribution in this list of mine. Bookness for medieval readers implies at least three things: leaves to turn at will; facing pages; and wholeness despite the heterogeneous nature of a book's contents. Schematically this means a mode of selection, of reading or not whatever is in front of one, which can imply that finally nothing is skipped, because within a book's wholeness everything encyclopedically leads to everything else anyway. Moreover, this bookness means a mode of presentation in what we can consider

    In the course of these contentions, or of ideas like them if I have misunderstood Howard, we have many observations about tellers and tales that any critic of any tale must consider. But in ten years now Howard's book has had a negligible impact on Chaucer studies generally and on Canterbury Tales studies in particular at least this is so when we look to the impact of work by illustrious predecessors in the field: by G. L. Kittredge, Ralph Baldwin, R. M. Lumiansky, Charles Muscatine, Robert O. Payne, D. W. Robertson, E. T. Donaldson and, belatedly, Robert Jordan. These scholars were responsible either for inventing or popularizing major notions in Canterbury Tales studies: the marriage group, the double pilgrimage, dramatic interplay, a mixture of high and low French style, Chaucer's rhetorical poetics, neo-patristic context and intent, Chaucer's persona, and non-organic, especially Gothic, analogues for Chaucer's structural and thematic esthetic. I think there is much in Howard's work that compares well in scope, novelty, and ambition with anything major written on Chaucer. I hope I have already conveyed some feel for that to you. Why, then, has Howard's work had a negligible impact aside from his positive influence on a few graduate students?

    I suppose the reasons are many, as is the case with odd neglect in humanistic letters or, perhaps, in any field carved up by specialists. We are many and we are much more specialized than we used to be much more, even, than we were twenty years ago when I considered my first graduate course. In the last ten years, to keep within the period since California published The Idea of the Canterbury Tales, Chaucer studies have branched out into many reconsiderations: manuscript and textual editing, with a school of editors devoted to shifting the scholarly text from the Ellesmere tradition of Manly, Rickert and Robinson to the tradition of the Hengwrt Manuscript; social history has come to the fore in such works as Janet Coleman's Medieval Readers and Writers, 1350-1400, and Richard Firth Green's Poets and Princepleasers: Literature and the English Court in the Late Middle Ages; Jill Mann and others have worked further in the literature of estates satire, showing us how Chaucer draws us into an engagement with, rather than a judgment of, characters; we now have major studies unearthing clerical and scholastic literary theory theory that is primarily neo-Aristotelian moral philosophy or that springs from exegetical traditions of accessus. I think here mainly of Alistair Minnis's and Judson Boyce Allen' s books the latter collaborating with Theresa Anne Moritz on A Distinction of Stories: The Medieval Unity of Chaucer's Fair Chain of Narratives for Canterbury; we have continuations of explication de texte in search of controlling puns or rhetorical and cognitive armature some pairing of thematic terms or implied terms around which tales or groups of tales revolve

    Even this ruined list suggests that Chaucerians are busy in intellectually demanding ways. We are so busy, I venture to say, that we have neglected to read each other as sympathetically as we should. Perhaps this is so because there are too many of us producing too much for any of us to read. But I think this is only part of the answer. We have not read even our big books well because, I fear, we are impatient with them; we do not feel the time is ripe for them; or we simply find their pretension more annoying than anything they achieve. Moreover, a big book that is largely literary critical in its sensibility, if not so in its subjects, has a rough time in our world of refreshed literary, intellectual, and social history. Finally, the philosophical vanguard for Chaucer studies generally and the Canterbury Tales especially is moral philosophy, not aesthetics see J.D. Burnley's notable Chaucer's Language and the Philosopher's Tradition.

    These are satisfying guesses, I think, but still more should be offered. We need to consider the imponderable but altogether real

    Perhaps our new, exciting, but disparate professionalism is really to blame for any particular instance of neglect. I would like to end these ruminations by indulging a little psycho-professionalism, if that term is not too painful to hear, and by a reflection upon our place in the world at large (such as it is). Our Chaucerian literary studies as well as

    If that were so, I think we would find ourselves simply unable to read medieval poetry as poetry. We would be reduced to decoding that poetry much as though it were an ancient and anomalous script. The experiences of generations of readers their

    What I wonder is this: why 'solve' Chaucer's poetry? Why not approach him and his work in a state of negative capability? I think we largely cannot do so because we would be professional, at least, in a world in which we find it difficult to justify ourselves or what we do, not to mention the literature we teach. Moreover, as professionals, we have lost faith in New Criticism, yet remain wedded to it in our ideas of style, organic form, and unity this is so even in our more bizarre structuralisms and deconstructions. Having lost faith, yet wishing to remain professional, we fall back upon some form of literary history, social history, or textual history a general movement in literary studies, by the way. As a profession we have not forged a literary aesthetic to replace the New Critical enterprise we are strangely happy to discredit. But lest we lose ourselves in the bewildering variety and expanse of social and historical studies, not to mention the study of scholastic traditions and meanderings, we try to pin Chaucer underneath something: insisting on new determinisms to replace the old mechanisms of literary history. Perhaps the antidote to all of this is a deprofessionalizing for a time of what we do: a move toward intelligent amateurism and to a potentially exciting freedom from the need to explain the literature we confront, discuss, and point to as best we can. Perhaps in some such way we can become alive again to Chaucer, to his

Allen, Judson Boyce and Moritz, Threase Anne, A Distinction of Stories (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1981).

Burnley, J. D., Chaucer's Language and the Philosopher's Tradition (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1979).

Coleman, Janet, Medieval Readers and Writers, 1350-1400 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).

Green, Richard Firth, Poets and Princepleasers (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980).

Howard, Donald R., The Idea of the Canterbury Tales (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976).

Mann, Jill, Chaucer and Medieval Estates Satire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976).

U.S. Naval Academy