Oxford Guides to Chaucer: The Shorter Poems.

Phillips, Helen

A. J. Minnis, with V. J. Scattergood and J.J. Smith, Oxford Guides to Chaucer. The Shorter Poems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995). xiv + 578 pp. ISBN 0-19-811193-2. 45.00 [pounds sterling].

In the third and final volume of the Oxford Guides to Chaucer Alastair Minnis writes on the dream poems, John Scattergood on the lyrics, and Jeremy Smith provides an exhilaratingly successful essay in a most difficult genre -- the short account of the language -- dealing clearly, concisely, and perceptively with matters from spellings to vocabulary, rhyme, and register in a manner illuminating to both critic and linguist.

John Scattergood's study of the lyrics is everything one would ask of such a guide, though short -- authoritative in research, clear in its treatment of critical issues and literary relationships, and critically innovative -- and it has important things to say about the relationship of both the discrete and the interpolated lyrics to Chaucer's narratives and his whole oeuvre. He shows, for instance, how Womanly Noblesse closes its circular form by transforming the amorous `reciprocity' between man and woman into a new reciprocity between the poet's preservation of the `remembrance' of her who is `auctour' of the perfections he admires (Chaucer's Dark Lady), and this is a theme Minnis explores in a different way in relation to The Book of the Duchess.

Minnis's guide to the dream poems characteristically appraises Chaucer from vantage points of learning, and of ideas that are generated at the interstices where areas of learning meet. This is epitomized by the preliminary section on `Chaucer and the dream vision form', which concentrates on ancient and medieval dream theories and on the approaches of modern feminism to `Courtly Love'. This intellectuality creates a study that will enrich fellow-critics and fairly advanced students with its insights, its vast networks of allusion, and its critical debates more successfully than it will guide an absolute beginner into these poems. Minnis's emphasis is on Chaucer as a supremely intertextual author and on gender issues; he sees him as a writer working in tensions and contradictions. His style of discussion tends to regard these as dialectic between what are, at base, philosophical positions, or between gendered attitudes and traditions, or as expressions of negotiations between the poet and his audience, rather than as social or ideological conflicts.

Minnis's characteristic method is to capture his subject from a great diversity of angles (such as medieval Latin or Italian auctores), or from unexpectedly quirky positions (for instance proposing Lollius as the `man of gret auctorite'). Its width of reference constantly produces surprises: he shows how the argument about form and matter, and men and women, in Il cortegiano illuminates the Legend of Medea; and the Book of the Duchess is considered not just in relation to obvious sources such as Machaut, Ovid, and Boethius, but also to Larkin and Higden's Polychronicon. These less-trodden paths of access lead to moments of profound critical illumination, as when Minnis takes us from a Guido delle Colonne analogue to the `key of rememberance' passage in the Legend to an exploration of the Book of the Duchess as, like the `olde bokes', a key for the Lancastrian household of how to remember Blanche, and simultaneously a dramatization of the medieval model of imaginatio, images, entering into the memory where they can be fixed and preserved.

Minnis has new and important things to say about all four poems, but his strengths show up best with the House of Fame. As one would expect, given his own unrivalled scholarship on medieval theories of authorship, the figure of the author receives careful attention throughout. The discussion of the Fame Dido as the locus of ideas about auctoritas, pp. 227-51, gains resonances no other critic could have given it. It is therefore a pity to have almost nothing on the second Dido narrative, in the Legend, or on the differences between them. It is perhaps a reflex of Minnis's focus on auctours that, rather than offering introductions to each of the individual heroines of the Legend and their legends, he organizes what he has to say about them under what we might call the founding fathers of their traditions: Ovid, Guido delle Collone, Jacobus of Voragine, and others. Interesting but ironical, since Chaucer's `naked text' claims to free these women and the record of their lives from the male literary tradition that has stood between their historical experience and its representation in books! Moreover, how a critic handles the legends, separately and as a sequence, is integral to his or her overall interpretation of the Legends tone, stance, and meaning: is it ironic or straight, feminist or misogynist, Christian/polemic or polyphonic, political or frivolous?

It is impossible to give more than a sample rather than a summary of this deep and complex study. It does not provide the obvious sort of guide to the dream visions we might expect, but no one would want to be without this powerful, original, wide-ranging, and thought-provoking exploration of the poems -- Minnis's own very distinctive auctoritas and haeccitas.

Seymour's catalogue of manuscripts of works other than (rather than `before') the Canterbury Tales is almost a very useful book, providing concise information on manuscript groups and relationships and a table of facts about individual manuscripts. It is marred by idiosyncrasies that lessen its utility and reliability. First on coverage: the book seems suddenly to tail off; there is no proper index of reference to topics or texts, no adequate coverage of the Equatorie, nor of Chaucer's lyrics and their manuscripts: they get just a page and a bit, under the heading `Apocrypha'. So we get no guidance on their often complex manuscript situations, nor any reference to interesting and lesser-known manuscripts -- such as Coventry City Record Office, MS 325, or Nottingham University, MS ME ML1 -- which contain lyrics. Some assertions go beyond ascertainable fact: for example that Blanche of Lancaster died of plague or that the Parliament was composed for Richard II's betrothal, 1382. It is aggressive: for instance, in two brief endnotes on p. 13 Seymour denigrates (`silliness', `naive', `uncritical') six different Chaucer scholars on the House of Fame. It also vacillates: Merciles Beaute is called `Chaucer's' on p. 18 but dismissed to the lowest category of doubtful attributions on p. 166. In the interests of accuracy, words like `might' and `perhaps' should often have been inserted. It is a particular pity since this is so close to being a valuable reference guide.

HELEN PHILLIPS

Nottingham