Chaucer and His Readers: Imagining the Author in Late Medieval England.

Welsh, Andrew

Chaucer and His Readers is a study of Chaucer's effect on selected English writers and readers of the fifteenth century. The focus is not on poetry and poetics but on canon formation and the "construction" of a major poet, on self-reflexiveness and self-fashioning by the writers who followed him, on ideas of authorship and authority, and on the conditions of patronage and production that surround and control literary texts. The stylistic mannerism and oblique form of argument sometimes associated with those critical concerns are also part of this study. A reader hears, for example, that the scribe John Shirley "aristocratizes" his scribal project, that Caxton's prologues and epilogues "narrativize" his reading of the past, and that Hawes' poems represent the "concretization" of the written word. It is not inappropriate, then, to say in general that in Chaucer and His Readers older ideas of "the burden of the past" and "the anxiety of influence" have been thoroughly New Historicized.

Professor Lerer watches the fifteenth-century writers and readers watching Chaucer and "canonizing" him in the process, not simply by exerting their own authority over his texts (though they do commandeer certain texts imperiously enough), but more fundamentally by subordinating themselves to his authority. Through all their responses to Chaucer's works, according to Lerer, run patterns of "subjection," the "infantilizing" of their literary identities in the presence of a "father" Chaucer, who in their minds was both the individual progenitor of English literature and the representative figure of a golden age of accomplishment in a poetic language (an "aureate" Chaucer) and social role (a "laureate" Chaucer) far beyond their own.

An interesting, though not always convincing, component of Lerer's interpretation sees these writers and readers defining their relationship to Chaucer's authority through one or another character in Chaucer's work, as they identify positions of subjection similar to their own in fictional figures such as the Clerk, the Squire, "Geffrey" the pilgrim, and the bungling scribe Adam Scriveyn. The Clerk, for example, can be seen in the Prologue to his tale as a figure caught between the authority of Petrarch, his source for the Griselda story, and that of Harry Bailly, who imposes his own requirements on the tale. He thus provided an example, Lerer writes, "for the fifteenth-century public poet, trapped between Chaucerian authority and the whims of commission" (25), and especially for Lydgate, who echoed the Clerk's "parable of patronage" (33) with his prologues in The Fall of Princes.

An especially valuable feature of this book is the close attention paid to the manuscript contexts of a number of Chaucerian works and fragments important to the fifteenth century. The fifteenth-century manuscripts provide new frames for individual Chaucerian narratives, characters, and lyrics, and in doing so provide them with new meanings. In one manuscript of the 1440s, Chaucer's dream-vision poems are seen to reflect the desire of its makers to reimagine a "gallant" world of courtly taste and royal patronage. In two later manuscripts, apparently intended for young readers, the Prologues and other references to the pilgrimage frame in the Pardoner's Tale, the Tale of Sir Thopas, and the Clerk's Tale are edited, rewritten, or simply dropped so that the complex ironies of different narrative levels are transformed into the simple pleasures of a good tale, good advice about proper behavior, and a good moral lesson.

Chaucer and His Readers presents unusual and fascinating prospects on the literary landscape of the fifteenth century, views sometimes strange but never drab. Curiously, Professor Lerer's "post-Chaucerian" age, in which poet and critic inescapably "share in the shadows of the secondary" (3), seems at times to echo our own.

ANDREW WELSH Rutgers University