Chaucer on Love, Knowledge and Sight.

Burnett, Charles

Norman Klassen, Chaucer on Love, Knowledge and Sight (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 1995). xi + 225 pp. ISBN 0-85991-464-X. 29.50 [pounds sterling]. In this book Norman Klassen uses a range of literary critical techniques to explore the language used by Chaucer and his contemporaries on love, knowledge, and sight to describe the physical and mental processes involved in love at sight, fascination, lovesickness, and other states in which love and physical symptoms are involved. He includes a chapter on the theories of sight current in Chaucer's period, in which he shows that the same kind of language occurs as that used by the poets. This is a valuable insight, and gives the book its originality, though he does not sufficiently explore the relationship between these scientific theories and the language of the poets. For example, he quotes a passage of Dante's Vita nuova which refers to `visual spirits' (pp. 98-9), but he fails to recognize these as the rays going out of the eyes which he has described in his discussion of the theory of extramission in chapter 2 (p. 41): a connection that would have been obvious if he had referred to the extensive philosophical and medical literature on `spirits' -- to which Calcidius and Constantine the African were perhaps the most influential contributors -- which clearly described the `spiritus visualis' or `visibilis' which issued from the eye and grasped the object of sight. There is a potential for exploring how Chaucer's knowledge of the relevant scientific literature informs his ideas of perception and the physical nature of love, just as John North has done in respect to Chaucer's cosmological and astronomical knowledge in Chaucer's Universe (Oxford, 1988). Klassen's intention is different, and remains at the level of literary criticism rather than cultural history. Nevertheless his book provides the texts and a framework for such an exploration.